It’s hard to make headlines with a portable music player these days. It’s old hat by now to carry around thousands of songs in your hip pocket, whether on an iPod or a smartphone.
But there’s been a price for portability. You are listening to your favorite music delivered only after a host of technology has diminished the resolution of the audio, by necessity, so that it can exist in a small digital file and make its way to your ears. It sounds fine, but the makers of a new portable music player are betting there are still some people out there who want even better quality.
Astell & Kern’s new portable music player, the AK100, delivers. About half the size of a pack of cigarettes, the AK100 boasts the ability to play music files with more than six times the information on your standard CD, and several times beyond that of a popular but lowly MP3 file. At $699, it’s also nearly five times the price of an iPod Nano.
The AK100’s magic rests primarily in its Wolfsen 24-bit DAC, or digital-to-analog-converter, which is a small piece of technology that converts the binary code of a digital music file into an analog signal your ears can hear. It just does it better than anything else in your briefcase or pocket.
MP3 files and a related format called AAC are the most common in digital music players such as the iPod. But converting your CDs to these formats or buying your music through iTunes results in a library of music with moderate sound quality. The sound is good, but music would sound better if it weren’t so digitally compressed after it’s mastered in the studio. These formats are often described as “lossy,” because you lose some data in the compression process.
By contrast, the higher-quality, FLAC format used in the AK100 is “lossless,” meaning no shortcuts are taken for the sake of file size. Files of this type can’t be purchased over the counter or ripped from your existing CDs. The high-definition albums have been mastered to perfection and are sold online through retailers such as HDtracks.com.
For perspective, CDs contain only 16-bit resolution after the re-mastering process, and MP3 files are several rungs down the quality ladder. Why is that so-called bit-depth important? Because it helps determine how much actual information is contained in the recording. There is a lot more data to define the sound in a 24-bit mastered audio file than a 16-bit standard CD file.
And given the right speakers or headphones, you’ll hear that difference.
The AK100 sounds better than anything I’ve ever listened to while walking around in public. I tried the AK100 with a variety of stylish headphones in the $100 to $400 range.
The same songs played on several other digital devices failed to deliver anywhere near the same audio experience, even when using the same headphones. The AK100 delivers the type of quality for custom listening rooms.