[Necron99]

I'm hoping someone might know some info on an issue I'm having a little frustration with. Whenever I hook up the ak jr to the stereo or car through the USB, only the files within the ak's internal storage show up, for some reason the files that are found in the micro SD I can't see. The weird thing is it worked once before but I can't figure out how it happened

Please, if any knows any info on this, I would truly appreciate it

​Try rescanning your files before you connect it to the USB.

 

[mrback]

anyone using an oppo pm-3 with the Jnr? be nice to get some impressions. 

 

[MrBlokemann]

I brought mine second hand about 2 and a bit months ago at around £200 because of mainly seeing fairly good reviews and I thought it should last longer than my 6+ year old COWON J3 that is on the last legs.
 
I found the following flaws-
Laggy UI that I can live with...
Crashes when plugged to a Linux/GNU machine ###
Gapless mode has a gapless gap up to 1-second to change tracks, a track to track merged song is then split, ###
DAC mode is around 300ms latency and the next sample in a DAW program is pointed to while the previously pointed sample plays through the DAC and no settings for no latency anywhere, confusing to spot error in music detail!.... It is consistent across multiple DAW and PCs!!!! Oh Well.
 
Until...........
 
 
There is a high sensitivity of the power button and it caused it's fatality----
 
However I mistakenly binned out wrong receipts and cannot return it in an epic fail turn of events...
The AK JR powers often in the pocket and the screen gets hot, overheated and is now dead! some lines down half portion and picture returns when put in freezer
My electronics experience, maybe I practice on some LCD to fix the silicon or ribbon if delaminated.
 
NOT IMPRESSED... Except for the sound quality, it beat the J3 in clarity by some margin, but fail to last long as the player was still untouched in the box from second hand store, protectors USB Leaflets etc unused, Like an Unwanted XMAS Gift so to speak.
 
 
 
Edit: 4/4/2017, Forgot to mention the bits marked ###

 

[damobananna]

I poked out the headphone port on my laptop last night its finally given up the goat
It would be really handy to have the dac that I paid for but it looks like I am goin to have to buy another one, not happy!
I urge people to stay away from this company.

I have tried disabling usb3 ports and updating drivers port in bios but still no sound 

 

[gordolindsay]

I poked out the headphone port on my laptop last night its finally given up the goat

It would be really handy to have the dac that I paid for but it looks like I am goin to have to buy another one, not happy!

I urge people to stay away from this company.


I have tried disabling usb3 ports and updating drivers port in bios but still no sound 

...given up the goat...sorry, but that is awesome!

 

[forestitalia]

...given up the goat...sorry, but that is awesome!

Yeah!, what does that have to do with anything 

 

[mrback]

hi
can anyone advise on how to tag compilations on the ak jnr? I have moved some onto the device but they are all just mixed into the same album. thanks in advance for any help.
cheers

 

[taylon]

Anyone else having weird Bluetooth playback on this unit? Bluetooth songs stops playing randomly. After it stops, any song I try to play does not play at all, the counter for the time of the song is always at 0:00. This is even when using a corded headphone. The only way to get music to play again is to do a reset. I have a email out to iriver support but was just wondering if this is a common issue.

 

[Necron99]

I have several 4.0 BT headsets and noticed when the headsets connected to other devices, besides the AK Stepchild,this problem would arise. Once I shutdown the BT on the other devices (iTouch or laptop in my case) then reconnected with the Stepchild, all was good.

 

[Necron99]

Oops

 

[taylon]

I have several 4.0 BT headsets and noticed when the headsets connected to other devices, besides the AK Stepchild,this problem would arise. Once I shutdown the BT on the other devices (iTouch or laptop in my case) then reconnected with the Stepchild, all was good.

I will give this fix a try. Thanks!

 

[Tstorey]

Just picked one of these up from Amazon at half the original MSRP. Wow. Beautiful sound combined with a pair of of Cosmic Ears CE6P. I'm no audiophile but the combination of size and sound is perfect.

 

[damobananna]

gone back to firmware 1.02 / lots better for bluetooth

 

[MikeLitoris]

USB DAC ISSUE *SOLVED* [WIN10/64BIT]

Pardon the super huge title. I just like to make sure those of you who, like me, bought the AK JR and got frustrated over the lack of sound when connecting as a USB DAC to not miss this read. I actually just created this account for this post.

Preamble (skip to [the fix] if you don't wanna hear my rants)
Scrolling through this forum, I quickly understood that the USB DAC was either a hit or miss function. Undeterred, with multiple reviews singing praises of the AK Stepchild's sound quality as well as finding a brand new ak jr sapphire edition set for sale at $200, I, like many of you lovely Headfiers here, decided to pull the trigger.

The ak jr immediately connect to my desktop. Driver installed smoothly without any issues and my playback devices was automatically configured to iriver USB DAC. Seeing how smooth sailing things were going, I thought I was one of the lucky ones with a working USB DAC unit until... no sound came out of my IEMS. Slightly annoyed, I composed myself and followed the recommended fix from this thread.

I tried:
1. Every single USB port inclusive USB 2.0 and 3.0 - no sound
2. Stock cable and a whole bunch of high quality Micro-USB cables on every port - no sound
3. Uninstalling/Disabling/Reinstalling its drivers via Device Manager - no sound
(starting to panic)
Reading that it did work on laptops with older windows version and with the packaging explicitly listing support:
4. I tried it out on my Windows 7 pro dell laptop, repeating steps 1-3 and.... no sound
5. Using an external USB 2.0 HUB - nope.

Alas. None worked. I started questioning myself - coming from a Hidizs AP60, a BUDGET DAP that costed me $60, which managed USB DAC functions easily with totally no issues - how does a well known company such as Astell&Kern manage to mess this up. They are not even showing initiative to rectify this issue. All of you headfi-ers here are right - this is totally unacceptable. I was so ready to sell my set away.

I must have almost scrolled through this entire thread searching for a viable solution.

The Fix
It must have been around page 70+ of this forum. I finally found the solution. It was right there, just not too obvious.

NOTE: I am using a Windows 10, 64-bit operating system on a DESKTOP. This fix requires you to access BIOS therefore i cannot guarantee that it can work for laptop users.

1. Restart/Boot Up your computer
2. Hit the BIOS keys (F2 or DEL on my Asus H81 motherboard)
3. Look for USB CONFIGURATION (mine was under advanced settings)
4. Look for INTEL xHCI (could state USB 3.0 or not) and hit DISABLE
/*if you cannot find this, just keep looking around - the key is to disable xHCI or anything that looks like it.*/
5. Reboot

Sweet sound started pouring out of my IEMS. [Finally] USB DAC function even extended to all my USB 3.0 ports.

Taken from Intel:
The eXtensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) specification describes the register-level host controller interface for universal serial bus revision 2.0 (USB2) and above.

To sum this up - No. The USB DAC function is not a HIT/MISS or a "Phantom" function. AK might not have foresaw this issue, but they definitely could have easily found a fix for it if they bothered.

HOPE THIS HELPS Y'ALL. CHEERS!

-A friendly Headfi-er

EDIT: I'll try my best to help all WINDOWS users as i am quite familiar with the platform/hardware. If you're a mac user, I can't help much but I happened to see many mac users solving this issue by using a USB 2.0 HUB - this can be found even on an external mac keyboard.

 

[MikeLitoris]

I poked out the headphone port on my laptop last night its finally given up the goat
It would be really handy to have the dac that I paid for but it looks like I am goin to have to buy another one, not happy!
I urge people to stay away from this company.

I have tried disabling usb3 ports and updating drivers port in bios but still no sound

Hello, i recently posted my fix. Disabling usb 3.0 ports just shuts down the port completely. You have to look for [xHCI] in the bios and disable it. Hope this helps!