southbeach
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 19, 2013
- Posts
- 8
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- 14
Another Weak amp...there are more really good integraled Amps at Not The rip off prices of A&K
Another Weak amp...there are more really good integraled Amps at Not The rip off prices of A&K
Yeah but no TIDAL streaming or talk of MQA capability. How can you release a product in 2016 for that much without these features?Well on the plus side, you're getting a solid transport and DAC for under $1000, which lets you shell out for a nice external amp like the Cv5, of Liquid Spark or whatever...
Yeah but no TIDAL streaming or talk of MQA capability. How can you release a product in 2016 for that much without these features?
Yeah but no TIDAL streaming or talk of MQA capability. How can you release a product in 2016 for that much without these features?
I personally gravitate to AK's players precisely because, rather than attempting to be jacks of all trade Android devices, they concentrate on three things, striking hardware design, sound quality, and a simple UI geared specifically to playback of offline music files, and do them superbly.
I gravitated away from them due to apparent re-use of the same headphone amplifier implementation (which isn't fantastic with lower impedance IEMs), and that I think sound quality went down after the original AK100/120 until the 300 series - and if you're willing to stack, then I find that their sound quality is easily bested by much cheaper solutions.
Getting an Onkyo DP-X1 in tomorrow, so it'll be interesting to see if that's going to be a better bet for occasional DAP use and mostly as a portable transport/streamer or if I have to go for something else and deal with the storage limitations.
Ironically I'd probably not be bothered by the lackluster amp and the comical price of the AK380 if it could manage enough storage to not force me into folder-browsing mode (defeating the point of having the thing in the first place).
This is definitely a "to each their own situation" because my experience regarding three of your points are actually the opposite: 1) having tried all of AKs players with the obvious exception of the AK300, my favorite is easily the AK100ii, above both the the players in the original 100 series, the 200 series (which I consider the 100ii and the 120ii to be a part of), and even the 380 and 320. 2) I find the AK players to be fantastic with the K10 and N4, both of which are relatively low-impedance IEMs. 3) on all of my IEMs, I rare use 2/3 of the power on the 100ii, which is significantly lower output that the rest of AKs lineup (while the output is definitely too weak to drive full-sized cans well, I didn't set out on my DAP search, which ultimately led me to the 100ii, looking for a DAP to drive my cans, I have plenty of amps at home for that).
I personally gravitate to AK's players precisely because, rather than attempting to be jacks of all trade Android devices, they concentrate on three things, striking hardware design, sound quality, and a simple UI geared specifically to playback of offline music files, and do them superbly.
Based on the current landscape, I do think iriver/AK made the correct decision with the AK Recoder / LP ripping tide-in. Think about it, LP is seeing growth in the recent years, and there has yet a truly high-res method on ripping them cleanly without too much of a hassle. LP to DSD is a great way for ripping LPs, and to promote DSD playback from high end DAPs in general. MQA is way too new as a standard, and the Tidal library is still rather limited.
Good call. In fact that's what they were demonstrating on their table today (after yesterday's presentation). Talking to AK, so it "rip" vinyl into DSD 5.6MHz. Something like this would be more interesting than microphone sound recording to me.