You may have already seen our blog regarding the AK120 and AK100 – these are fantastic portable music players offering the highest level of fidelity available today. Given that technology advances eons in minutes (overstatement!), knowing that adequate support is available from the manufacture is essential. Take Apple devices for example – you have the one device and this lasts you a long time, but you are not stuck with this, constant firmware updates improve, refine and augment the function and usability. The same can be said for the AK120 and 100. The last thing you want is to keep changing the unit itself, however, you don’t need to – just update the firmware!
AK100
In June, the AK100 was graced with gapless playback, something that caused great debate on Head-Fi, or should I say lack of gapless playback caused great debate! We are pleased to say this is now an available feature. Coming towards the middle of July will be the ability to use the AK100 as a DAC. Since it already includes a high quality DAC chip, this feature will open a whole world of options to you, augmenting your existing system to great highs!
AK120
The ultimate portable player is about to get even better! Out of the box, the AK120 probably comes with version 1.0 – this is great to get started but an upgrade is needed, available here: https://www.iriver.com/support/download_list.asp. This will allow the unit to be used as a USB DAC, and with twin Wolfson DAC’s why wouldn’t you want this upgrade?!
The improvements do not stop there however; coming soon is DSD playback – those of you out there with SACDs may well be getting excited at this proposition. In honesty there are not many standalone DACs which offer this. According to Astell & Kern, the Wolfson DAC will take these files and process them, not in a traditional way – however it will be bit perfect and bound to sound divine!
STOP THE PRESS!
We at Audio Affair are pleased to announce (I believe we are the first) the soon to arrive Astell & Kern dock! Details are sparse at the moment but it is in production. We believe it will work with both the AK100 and AK120, there is also talk about a Bluetooth remote control – the buzz has already started around the office here. It won’t be too long before the forums are alight with rumours! There are no pictures at the moment, and I am not artistically capable enough to create what I think it may look like, but given the aesthetics of the previous two models I am in no doubt it will be fantastic. As for sound quality it is bound to be a winner!