Astell&Kern AK Jr High Resolution Audio Player - Aluminium

This is a fantastic product and at £250 its a total bargain to boot. There have been a number of comments about latency and stability of the touch screen graphics, there have been two firmware updates for this product one of which specifically deals with this issue. The latest version is V1.03 and new payers are shipped with this version as mine was, I can say that I have experienced no issues at all with the touch screen interface which works perfectly so I assume the issues mentioned have been resolved. If you have an older version of firmware you can get the updates from the AK website so resolving the issue is fairly straight forward. In terms of sound quality the player is stunning, I tried a range of players up to £500 before making my decision and regardless of cost this little player won hands down, and without the risk of having to carry a brick around in your pocket. Its easy to use and has a really robust and eye catching design, its also small and light and isn't designed as a glorified smart phone like some of the competition, its a music player pure and simple and that's really all it does, but boy does it do it well! There has been some discussion about MP3 320kps being as good as CD, its not! As a minimum standard you will want to use a lossless format like FLAC to transfer your CDs and a quick comparison with MP3 will show MP3 up for what it is, muddled incoherent rubbish. To really appreciate the sound quality on offer from the AK Jr 16 bit 44khz (i.e. CD) is a minimum and to understand its true potential you will need to move to some of the hi definition formats the device supports. There have been some complaints about the lack of output options available for connection to other devices, this is not a problem for me but there is Blue Tooth available and the headphone output can be configured as "Line-Level" so with a good quality 3.5mm Jack to Phono converter you can connect directly to a pre-amp and enjoy pretty good quality. Battery life is around 6/7 hrs but my experience is that the unit charges quickly and I never listen for more than a couple of hours a day so no issue really. The unit is easy to connect to your PC for file transfer and the touchscreen based interface is easy and intuitive to use. I have a high end CD/Amp/Headphone hifi set up using Sennheiser HD800 headphones which I used to do a comparison using the Sennheiser's and while the AK Jr couldn't match my HiFi kit it gave a pretty good account of itself for the money. So my final point is related to headphones, you will need to get some higher end headphones to really get the best out of your AK Jr, this is true for any high end audio equipment so there is no point pairing the player with mediocre headphones and thinking the player isn't that great because it will be the headphones that are limiting performance not the player. I am using Sound Magic E80s day to day with the AK Jr and they sound superb, that said it sounded another world better with my Sennheiser's which are way too good but which emphasise my point.So in summary if you want a hi def music only player that sounds amazing, is easy to use, is built to last and will fit into your shirt pocket for the bargin price of £250 look no further. Hope that helps with some difficult decision making, although the decision is pretty clear to me.

I have had this player for a few weeks now as I didn't want to be too hasty to review it.After some consideration here are my thoughts:SoundThis player sounds fantastic. You can really tell the difference in quality between MP3, WAV and FLAC files.Obviously the better the headphones the better it sounds. I have a pair of AKG K452 headphones and it sounds very good through these. I also put it through my Beyerdynamic DT990s and it sounds superb.I tried other headphones in Currys just to test out and a lot of them paled in comparison, particularly Beats which just sounded flubby, for want of a better word.InterfaceThis is very simple and intuitive. It doesn't do anything fancy and in some respects this is detrimental. You cannot reorder tracks unless you add them to a playlist. They will be as they are on your computer so be careful with naming tracks, especially putting numbers at the front. When you get into double digits of tracks on an album you need to write numbers as 01, 02, 03 etc instead of 1,2,3 because otherwise you end up with eg 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4 which is annoying.I have found that the best way to access all the music is via the Files menu rather than going through Artist or Album as it doesn't seem to display everything I uploaded these ways.One major bugbear is that there is no quick way of selecting a letter within the artists so you end up scrolling through for a while if you have hundreds of artists on your player.Touch screenThe touch screen is ok. Sometimes it selects instead of scrolling which can be annoying but if you do it to the far left of the screen it is easier. There isn't a great deal of the lag that others have complained of.FeelThis device is nice and small but a decent wait. Feels very well made. Very pocketable. Takes a while to get used to using the wheel for volume adjustment. I still naturally reach for the buttons, which change tracks and play and pause!OverallI am happy with it. If A&K would add a quick reference letter bar at one side like on Google Music it would change it from good to great. I am not overly enamoured with the touch screen but it's ok.I am mainly keeping it for the DAC function, which I am yet to try out.I was considering the Fiio X5ii or iii but the reviews I read put me off, particularly regarding the DAC function and from what I hear the sound quality on the AK Jr is better.So overall room for improvement but possibly unbeatable for the price if you value sound quality and simplicity. If you don't care about the sound as much I would probably go for an ipod for its usability.