Astell & Kern AK380 black

The Astell & Kern AK380 is undisputedly the absolute best of what the market of portable audio players offers. This FLAC player is a masterpiece that delivers the truest and most natural sound possible. Astell & Kern, its producer, has put in all the top-of-the-line technologies currently available. In its nearly hissless circuitry, the AK380 uses two spectacular digital-to-analog converters - the 32-bit AKM AK4490. Simply put, every bit of the AK380 was designed with professional audio in mind.

Key features

• A symmetrical construction with two AK4490 converters
• Support formats up to the resolution or 384 kHz / 32 bit
• Native support for DSD without any oversampling
• 4" AMOLED touch screen
• Accurate parametric equaliser settings
• High-precision clock with a reference jitter value of 200 femtoseconds
• Can be used with a PC as an external sound card
• New possibilities of streaming music over AK Connect App
• Internal memory of 256GB

Unsurpassed sound

The Astell & Kern AK380 plays up to 32-bit, 384 kHz, any 24-bit music files, or double layer DSD 5.6MHz natively, without conversion, compression or down sampling. Each channel uses a dedicated standalone converter chip which ensures unsurpassed stereo sound. The AK380 is also the first portable player in the world equipped with a high-precision clock with a reference jitter value of 200 femtoseconds. That enables the AK380 to create more accurate frequency values, make fine jitter corrections, and reproduce analogue sound closer to the original source than ever.

Accurate sound adjustment

The AK380 uses a parametric equaliser and an audio digital signal processor to deliver the most detailed adjustment of the original sound. The equaliser has 20 bands which can be adjusted in ±0.01 dB steps. 

Astell&Kern has also enhanced the DLNA functionality via the AK Connect app. The player connects wirelessly to a NAS or PC and can be easily controlled with a smartphone or tablet. This way, files can be freely transferred and streamed without the hassle of turning on the computer and physically connecting with a cable.

Additional information:

display:
4" WVGA (480 × 800) touchscreen

sampling:
PCM 8 kHz ~ 384 kHz (8/16/24/32 bits per Sample) / DSD Native: DSD64 (2.8 MHz 1-bit), Stereo / DSD128 (1 bit 5.6 MHz), Stereo / DSD256 (1 bit 11.2 MHz), Stereo

Output level:
Unbalanced 2.2 Vrms / Symmetrical 2.3 Vrms

DAC:
AKM AK4490 x2 (Dual DAC)

Decoding:
up to 32bit / 384kHz Bit a Bit

Input:
USB Micro-B (charging and data transfer) / Mod: MTP (Media Device)

Output:
Headphones (3.5 mm) / Optical (3.5 mm) / Symmetric (2.5 mm, 4-pin)

Wifi:
802.11 b / g / n (2.4GHz)

Bluetooth:
V4.0 (A2DP, AVRCP, aptX)

Frequency range:
±0.053 dB, 20 Hz ~ 20 kHz ±0.56 dB at 10 Hz ~ 70 kHz

Crosstalk:
130 dB @ 1 kHz, unbalanced / 135 dB @ 1 kHz, symmetrical

THD + N:
0.0008% @ 1 kHz, unbalanced / 0.0007% @ 1kHz, symmetrical

Output Impedance:
Symmetrical 2.5 mm (1 ohm) / 3.5 mm headphones (2 ohms)

Clock jitter:
30 ps (Typ)

Reference clock jitter:
200 femtoseconds

Battery:
3400 mAh 3.7 V Li-Polymer

Memory:
256 gigabytes (NAND) + microSD (Max 128 gigabytes)

Supported OS:
Windows XP, Windows 7,8,10 (32 / 64bit), Mac OS X 10.7 or later