One of my favorite combos - A&K SR25 - Balanced out - WA11 Topaz - Black Dragon balanced cable - Grado RS1e. What a fantastic synergy these components bring together. Rock n Roll Heaven! Reference sound for sure but also very engaging. Closest representation of a Klipsch Heresy speaker experience (on the head) as I have heard. Legendary sound replication in a transportable package - what a great time we live in!
SE line out on the SR25 is great as well, paired with the likes of the the WA8 eclipse. You are in for a listening experience that is definitively unique to the components used. This is the hobby! Using the same headphone cable combo as with the Topaz. The WA8 brings a whole new dimension - better best - who knows? New, different, engaging, euphoric, holographic, audiophile, pleasing, you name it. I just love it.
Hmmm, I thought I was getting all the source I needed with the SR25.
So far I’m just using the SE out to my CA Cascade; using either the SR25 as the source, or as USB DAC from MacBook Pro, and I'm thrilled with the result so far. Plan is to get a 2.5mm balanced cable for the Cascade, probably sooner than later...
How would you compare with/without the WA amp? Another next purchase I'm considering is some kind of Schiit, maybe an Asgard or a Modi/Magni combo..
I'm lucky enough have an SR25 on loan from a friendly local dealer for a few days. Initial impressions are: -
Awesome sound quality - particularly over a balanced cable to a pair of Moondrop Starfield IEMs that I bought to give the SR25 a workout.
Good LDAC Bluetooth connection to a pair of Sony WH-1000XM2.
Superb native hi-res support
Fluid user interface.
Great battery life.
Agree with some other comments about slightly flaky WiFi and Bluetooth pairing (just showing MAC addresses of all and sundry in the area).
Also, as a UK user, no support for the BBC Sounds app - A&K used to support the old BBC iPlayer Radio but I can't get the SR25 (nor my Activo) to recognise the APK as an installable service. Hope they will fix this at some point.
Now, just have to decide whether to pull the trigger on one...
I'm lucky enough have an SR25 on loan from a friendly local dealer for a few days. Initial impressions are: -
Awesome sound quality - particularly over a balanced cable to a pair of Moondrop Starfield IEMs that I bought to give the SR25 a workout.
Good LDAC Bluetooth connection to a pair of Sony WH-1000XM2.
Superb native hi-res support
Fluid user interface.
Great battery life.
Agree with some other comments about slightly flaky WiFi and Bluetooth pairing (just showing MAC addresses of all and sundry in the area).
Also, as a UK user, no support for the BBC Sounds app - A&K used to support the old BBC iPlayer Radio but I can't get the SR25 (nor my Activo) to recognise the APK as an installable service. Hope they will fix this at some point.
Now, just have to decide whether to pull the trigger on one...
it’s really very surprising sound quality over the balanced output. They make my Solaris SE absolutely sing... better even than the cube with the Solaris.
@Tristy , seeing that you owned Mojo in the past and own SR25 now, would you be able to draw any comparisons from memory in terms of SQ and power? Sorry, I know it's a bit of apples-to-oranges comparison...
I own SR25 and very happy with it with my Xelento and CL2 iems. However it lacks juice when trying to power my 6XX (unbalanced though) and I was thinking to pick up some more demanding over-ears too. I can imagine Mojo wouldn't be better than SR25 for iems, but was suggested to pick it up for 6XX and such.
Also, as a UK user, no support for the BBC Sounds app - &K used to support the old BBC iPlayer Radio but I can't get the SR25 (nor my Activo) to recognise the APK as an installable service. Hope they will fix this at some point.
it’s really very surprising sound quality over the balanced output. They make my Solaris SE absolutely sing... better even than the cube with the Solaris.
@Tristy , seeing that you owned Mojo in the past and own SR25 now, would you be able to draw any comparisons from memory in terms of SQ and power? Sorry, I know it's a bit of apples-to-oranges comparison...
I own SR25 and very happy with it with my Xelento and CL2 iems. However it lacks juice when trying to power my 6XX (unbalanced though) and I was thinking to pick up some more demanding over-ears too. I can imagine Mojo wouldn't be better than SR25 for iems, but was suggested to pick it up for 6XX and such.
I’m afraid I owned the mojo so long ago that I can’t draw too much from memory for comparisons. All I took from the mojo was that it had a warm sound sig with a rolled off treble (with the earphones I had at the time anyway) but very powerful and good detail retrieval. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.
I think Gary has both, might be able to compare? @gazzington
I've got mine coming in Monday, primarily going to use it as a streaming / tidal offline transport for my N8 but quite excited to use it for on the go and previewing tidal albums for offline. Anyone paired it with T9IE? Quite tempted to go with these to use with it (mostly Rock music) and watch movies / YouTube etc on my tablet.
The issue with line out is steering wheel integration is lost. That might (understandably) be a minor issue for many folks. After all, one can just make a very long playlist and hit play before driving.
I have personally gotten used to control through the steering wheel as I started this hobby from iTunes and an iPhone, where Bluetooth through the steering wheel just always worked. As a result, it’s been a bit of a disappointment that bluetooth with my Kann Cube doesn’t seem to work all that well. I can’t make it through a single song without some kind of dropout or stutter.
But the SR25 is running a new version of Android (9.0?). If they have finally got Bluetooth working I will buy the SR25. It really is worth it to me to have a working Bluetooth connection.
I eagerly anticipate hearing your feedback on Bluetooth with A&K through your vehicles!
Well I am happy to report much better results BT pairing with my cars.
SR25 found my 2018 Mazda by name first go and works very well. Sound is not bad either.
Didnt find my 2011 VW by name, but it was the only MAC address of any device in BT range, and got it to pair successfully after a bit of faffing around with the older BT on the VW.
Havent used either for any length of time to see if I get dropouts or stutter, but the pairing seems OK for now...
The SR25 has been very cool in my experience, even after serveral hours of playback. I only once noticed that it got warm when I was downloading some 50 albums from Tidal while playing music at the same time.
On another note: Last week, I head a weird error on the side-loaded Tidal app (Vers. 2.24). As usual, I wanted to listen to my downloaded music in offline mode, but the app said that it wasn't possible to load the albums. Is there some auto-deletion of the cache after a while? When I went online again for a few minutes, everything worked when I went back offline. Has anyone experienced this as well?
I had until recently noticed that the SR25 got very hot when playing DSD and DSF files, which I love for classical music. It also got a bit warm with streaming. With the first, I was starting to get really worried.
i read somewhere in this forum that the problem was with files not downloaded to the card in the player but somewhere else. I had my 400 g card filled with files in my sony nwa-55. I then formatted the card and copied my files directly in the sr25 from the computer. Now the heating issue with DSD and DSF files has completely dissapeared. The Sr25 still gets a bit warm with streaming, I would say more with Dlna streaming, but nothing that worries me. Sound still as wonderful with the DSDs
Hope this helps
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