It’s all well and good having decent headphones…
But source is key!
In a world where the famed iPod Classic has been discontinued as people flock to streamed lossy content and mobile phones, a large hole has been left in the portable music player sector.
Luckily enough, Korean outfit Astell & Kern has come to the party to hand out a range of portable music players as well as some other accessories and headphones.
We have received our first of players, the AK70.
This player features 64Gb of on board storage with the option for expandable memory of up to ‘200Gb’. (Currently, this means 128Gb Micro SD card, but with the possibility of higher storage in the future.)
Look and Feel:
The housing of the AK70 is solid aluminium and it feels great in the hand. It is no larger than a deck of cards and features a modest sized screen of decent quality and resolution. (It’s for music, not movies!)
You also get a free, really quite nice quality leather case to protect itself, and your pocket. There are 4 buttons. A skip forward, skip back, play/pause and power on. Volume is controlled via a nice digital rotary wheel.
There is also two outputs – A conventional 3.5mm output for pretty much all portable headphones, as well as a 2.5mm TRRS jack for a balanced output! That’s right, a portable player with balanced output!
Sound-wise this thing is very good and happily surpasses my HTC One M8 (Which is pretty darned good in itself). It’s ultra quiet and really gives you that ‘HiFi’ sound. I won’t dig deep into a full on review, so the pressure is on for you to come in and listen for yourself.
William
