These portable devices bring impressive hi-fi quality to your music, wherever you want to take it
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Astell & Kern A&norma SR25 MkII £699
Considering the shrinking portable music player market – in all likelihood squashed by the smartphone – Astell & Kern need not have tried so hard with this upgrade to their Award-winning entry-level player. But if we can assume anything about the South Korean company’s engineers, it’s that they are tinkerers by nature. If they find an opportunity to squeeze more out of a player, they will. And have with the A&norma SR25 MkII.
This latest entry-level player retains all the features that made its predecessor such a pleasing music companion: 32-bit/384kHz and DSD256 file compatibility, two-way Bluetooth with LDAC and aptX HD support, the ability to use the player strictly as a DAC, and built-in access to streaming services plus a full MQA decoder.
The built-in 64GB storage will accommodate roughly 200 CD-quality FLAC albums or about one fifth as many in 24-bit/192kHz quality, so avid collectors of hi-res albums will probably need to fork out for a microSD card (of up to 1TB) to expand on the integrated memory.
To satisfy what must currently be a niche crowd, a balanced Pentaconn 4.4mm headphone jack now joins the existing 3.5mm and balanced 2.5mm outputs on the SR25 MkII. The addition of an internal silver-plated shielding to protect the player from electromagnetic interference, in the name of improved performance, joins a new optional Replay Gain setting, designed to maintain uniform volume playback across files up to 24-bit/192kHz. AK File Drop makes it easier to transfer files to and from the player wirelessly, while BT Sink allows music from, say, a phone to play through the SR25 MKII.
As sonic characters go, the SR25 MKII’s is an instantly likeably one – warm and full-bodied so that notes across the spectrum sound fleshed out and textured – and at the same time lively and rhythmic so that musicality is given just as much precedence as analysis. Whether driving Elvis Costello’s hell-for-leather Lipstick Vogue or getting under the dynamically oscillating ebb and flow of Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm’s Four, it has tons of detail, dynamic insight, precision and punctual timing. This is a revealing player, so we would partner it with suitably talented headphones, and it can just as well be home hi-fi if your system requires a digital music source.
While we have described entry-level dedicated music players as natural upgrades for the audio qua
