[558698]

Not yet, expecting it to be available soon. Just asked the team for an update.

I'll be eagerly awaiting news! It'd definitely be another plus for getting Roon.
By the way, is there maybe any word yet on whether we might be seeing the new UI on the SE180?
Really hoping we'll get that.

 

[peanutslab]

New in here. Hi all. I ordered a SE180 the other day with the SEM4 dac, and no surprise, it won't turn on either. Not a great start but waiting for a new one to be sent out. I suspect the problem is due to it running a lipo battery and these units being kept in very cold warehouses which lipos hate. Possibly caused by units being sent out pre-charged and not being discharged to a low state as lipos are supposed to be. Just guessing; but I would not be surprised.

Looking forward to getting Roon Arc on the unit as I have a full Roon system in the house across my main listening setup, smart speakers in various rooms, hooked together with Control4. For the headphones, previously been using a seperate DAC into a Woo WA8 with a set of Utopia cans which was brilliant but not very portable when you hook it all together with a phone or laptop! Also looking forward to using the unit in the car which was another reason why I bought it, the LDAC being a great feature to hook through to an amp with a hires BT receiver.

 

[peanutslab]

Received the replacement and it works fine, initial thoughts. SEM1 sounds good, dynamic, punchy, slightly bright for my taste being 50+. SEM4 is fantastic, lovely tonal balance, plenty dynamic. DAR I'm not sold on so far, it seems to pump up the bass, focus the soundstage, and you lose a bit of the dynamics. Not touched the EQ side yet. I thought the SEM1 was a bit bass light on my Utopia, but with a cheap set of phones there was loads of bass, so clearly can dependent. SEM4 is spot on. Soundstage is great, separation excellent. Interface isn't fast, it's liveable but device could do with a newer OS and more RAM and definitely 5ghz wifi as downloads are a bit tardy. How you switch between apps is a bit rubbish as well. Tidal seems a better experience than Qobuz. Overall cracking SQ and very happy with my Focal and the SEM4.

Q: how do you tell the unit to use the SD card for downloads? Both Tidal and Qobuz seem to be using the internal storage so far. Does it just switch to SD when you run out of space on the internal storage? Can't see where/how to change this.

Edited to add works perfectly as a Roon endpoint. Can't wait for Roon ARC to hit.

Edited, found the storage settings in the Tidal and Qobuz apps themselves.

 

[peanutslab]

Few more thoughts. Spent quite a lot of time with the unit now, mostly because my house has been filled with teenies having a party this weekend driving me insane, but we won't go there lol.

DAR, I'm not totally sold. I think it feels purely like a DSP effect, which I guess it is. For me it constricts the soundstage, flattens off some of the treble response, and plumps up the mids, lower mids and bass regions. Which might sound great on some tracks (tracks with excessive sibilance) and on some cans. It seems to have a positive influence on some rock and badly recorded material. But on anything with a wider, fuller soundstage already I don't really like it, it's sort of the effect I'd expect from a cheaper set of cans. This is on my Utopia, it will most definitely have a different effect on different cans so YMMV.

Software, wow. I'm finding Qobuz to be a bit of a mare. I upgraded both Tidal and Qobuz to their latest versions and also added Tune In radio app. Qobuz is very unresponsive, some buttons just dont seem to work when they feel like it, like the minorly important ones, like back! Annoying. Downloading anything is ridiculously slow. I did some investigation through my network and the unit is running Wifi 3, which is bloody stupid today. Max speed after tweaking the network is 54 mbps, but Qobuz does not get anywhere near that speed, it is +1-2 seconds to download a megabyte and I have a leased line at 1 gbps, zero contention. If you stack up a load of downloads (I will use it in the car offline) it grinds to a halt, and it seems when it start grinding, whatever is being played gets a half second break every 3-4 minutes. I don't think I can run Qobuz on this unit.

To Tidal. I'm pleased to say the latest rev. 2.73.0 works pretty well. The only thing is, some albums sound a lot better via Qobuz than Tidal. No streaming service has everything though. I've mainly been using Qobuz this weekend so will report back on how Tidal fares with extended play. The download speed is massively improved with Tidal, it rocks through a song download at a reasonable rate, I guess about 30-45 seconds, still not fast, but it was taking minutes with Qobuz. Tidal is a lot easier to use from an interface point of view as well. I wish you could turn off a lot of the dross though and just have a search function and your music library. There's too much cluttering up the app that is just too slow on the unit to be worthwhile.

TuneIn works, clunky as hell, slow, but it turns the radio station on, which well, is all I am bothered about.

So if you ask me a lot of the issues aren't down to the unit it's down to the implementation of the various apps, and Qobuz isn't doing AK any favours. I've not tried any ripped music from CD using the built in player, which might be the better option I'm sure, but not much flexibility.

SQ is still very impressive and I love the SEM4, it's got pretty much exactly what I want tonally. Relaxed, natural, plenty of bass with the right track, not overly forward, not too overstated in the treble. As I said before it's a great match with the Utopia. I'd love to compare this to a SP3000 as I'm struggling to think what I would improve.

I'm listening to Primal Scream Chaosmosis at the moment, and it's a good example of where DAR is just too forward and muddy.

 

[shwnwllms]

@peanutslab are you upsampling to PCM or DSD when using DAR? (There is a toggle in settings)

 

[peanutslab]

@peanutslab are you upsampling to PCM or DSD when using DAR? (There is a toggle in settings)

The latter, which it seems to come set on by default.

 

[peanutslab]

Wow, I think I've found another bug. It was displaying PCM under DAR before, despite it being set to DSD. Now I've toggled it to PCM, then back to DSD, it is now showing DSD under DAR...... Looks like I am going to have to listen to it again! Very weird.

 

[shwnwllms]

Wow, I think I've found another bug. It was displaying PCM under DAR before, despite it being set to DSD. Now I've toggled it to PCM, then back to DSD, it is now showing DSD under DAR...... Looks like I am going to have to listen to it again! Very weird.

You’ll know when it’s DSD when the light on the side (under the volume wheel) is purple

I suspect it was upsampling only to PCM as DSD should be the opposite of “muddy”

 

[peanutslab]

That's exactly why I thought it was working, it was going purple, and it still is... but it showed PCM under DAR

Edit: By that I mean under the pull down menu on the top. In the settings it was set to DSD, but on the pull down, under DAR it said PCM until I just toggled it to PCM, tried that, then toggled it back to DSD. After I did that it now says DSD under DAR on the pull down menu.

 

[shwnwllms]

That's exactly why I thought it was working, it was going purple, and it still is... but it showed PCM under DAR

Edit: By that I mean under the pull down menu on the top. In the settings it was set to DSD, but on the pull down, under DAR it said PCM until I just toggled it to PCM, tried that, then toggled it back to DSD. After I did that it now says DSD under DAR on the pull down menu.

Interesting. It probably wasn’t fully engaged regardless of the light. Do you notice any difference?

 

[peanutslab]

Need to listen to it for longer, but there is definitely a bloom to my ears around warmer music, particularly vocals. Example Video Games, Lana Del Rey. There's more clean space around her voice without DAR, frequencies seem flatter, with it on it's warmer around the mid tones. Feels pushed. It most definitely takes the sharp edge off sibilance and I can also hear less edge on tracks where you want to hear the edge, but it helps a lot on some tracks where it can descend into a mess otherwise. Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cutter for example. I picked those two tracks to check it out as the former is warm and the latter can be horrible on the wrong DAC. Everyone's ears are different so might not be the same for others. As you age and you can't hear extended frequences you become more attuned to the frequencies you can hear. Feels like horses for courses to me at the moment but will keep listening. On some material it sounds incredible, Muddy Waters Unk in the Funk album where there is plenty of space already. To be honest it doesn't really matter as it sounds fantastic either way. The overall balance is what's important to me.

 

[frankraindog]

I‘ve Slow Downloads with qobuz app on ibasso dx320 as well. So there I‘ve switched to Apple music which loads a highres Album in seconds which took qobuz a few minutes. So I can confirm the problem is Not the se180 on this issue

 

[turbofeet]

I recently picked one of these up on eBay. It's perfect except for a small dink on the bottom corner which you can't see with the case on anyway. The screen is perfect.

I tried an iBasso DX320 but it wouldn't turn on initially (unless you connected it to a PC) and then after an hour or so the screen seemed to die completely. Shame as it sounded lovely.

With the iBasso I could install Roon and even my ZeroTier application to access my Roon core while out and about. Worked great but then the screen died so I had to send it back. Apparently a common problem with iBasso DAPs so thought best to avoid them.

I bought this in the hope that I will eventually use Roon ARC as I read A&K are supporting ARC on the SP3000 and this should filter down but unfortunately this is not possible yet of course.

I reached out to A&K and they said:

"To drive Roon ARC, the role of the CPU is important, so it is necessary to review several things. Due to this situation, the update schedule for Roon ARC support is undecided.
Thank you for your understanding and patience."

This does seem to imply it might take a while. Let's hope they do decide to support ARC.

I see some of you are talking about this already but have any of you managed to install Roon or any other "unofficial" applications as an APK?

I cannot see the APKs at all in the Services Menu so I assume they are filtering the supported apps. For example if you download an APK of Tidal or Qobuz that will show up.

I tried to rename the APK to Qobuz.apk to cheat it but that didn't work either lol

It's odd as the APK Pure app is shown in a, A&K YouTube video describing how to install apps but even that doesn't show up. I guess it must have at some point.

On another note I am quite impressed with the sound with my Meze Empyreans. I have an SEM3 in the post as well to try tomorrow. I thought the SEM4 would be more up my street but I'm quite liking even the SEM1.

This is using Bluetooth (LDAC) from my Samsung Tablet. I couldn't really tell the difference between that and Roon over Wi-Fi at home.

For now I can install all the apps I want on the Tablet and then connect in this manner but it would be nice to just have the one device connected to Wi-Fi away from home.

Bring the ARC forth...

 

[turbofeet]

Just a thought. I gave received the SEM3 and its excellent but I still feel I might prefer the warmer SEM4.

Anyone in the UK want to swap to test?

If we both prefer the other then we swap. If any of us prefers what we had before we both return (insured post of course).

Saves spending £370 just to try it out. PM me if this idea would appeal anyone.

I am very impressed with this DAP.

 

[shwnwllms]

I’ve got an SEM2 up for sale in the classifieds for anyone who is looking

https://www.head-fi.org/classifieds/price-drop-astell-kern-sem2-amp-dac-module-for-se180.34939/