Recenzja wzmacniacza lampowego Astell & Kern SP3000T: mieszczącego się w kieszeni

Do you want to hear the best-sounding portable music player in creation? Something that plays your favourite songs better than you’ve always heard them? Do you have an extra $3,000, another couple grand worth of headphones, and a advanced tolerance for bulky hardware and laggy software? If you said yes to all of the above, then Astell & Kern’s flagship digital audio player — the SP3000T — is about to make your sonic dreams come true.

Analog stalwarts compose love letters to the warm, natural, lifelike sound of the tube amp; proponents of solid-state digital amplifiers praise their precision and faithful reproduction of the origin material. But why choose? Alongside a peerless digital op amp, the SP3000T has an honest-to-goodness tube amp, complete with a pair of vintage Raytheon JAN6418 vacuum tubes. Tube amps are mostly only found in much larger home hi-fi equipment, so integrating them into something that (barely) fits in your pocket is simply a serious feat of engineering. And the SP3000T lets you choose between the digital amp, the tubes, or a hybrid mode with 5 different levels of crossover. The consequence is absolutely astonishing sound.

The SP3000T is simply a brick of a device, with the left and right edges sticking out a bit in shallow pyramids. It’s 3.33 inches wide, 5.57 inches tall, and 0.7 inches deep, and it weighs more than a pound — 17 ounces, or 18.5 ounces if you usage the yellow calf leather case that comes with it. And you’ll want to, due to the fact that those silver-plated steel edges and corners are uncomfortably sharp. I would genuinely be afraid of it tearing through a pocket without the case. Even with the case, it’s awkward, and if you’re wearing sweatpants, you’d better have the drawstring tied. Fortunately, the case looks good and makes it comfortable to hold, though it besides obscures the 4 side buttons, rendering them almost useless. It has slight indents to show where they are, but they’re not nearly distinct adequate to find by feel. The fact that it’s leather may besides make this a nonstarter for vegans.

The 5.5-inch, 1080p touchscreen is bright adequate to see on a sunny day and sharp adequate for album art to look good. On the left side of the device are 4 tiny buttons for play / pause, track forward, track back, and amp selection. On the right side is simply a chunky volume knob with LED underglow that changes colour depending on the music bitrate. Up top, it has a standard 3.5mm unbalanced audio jack, 3.5mm optical output, and 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced outputs, plus the power button. On the bottom, there’s a USB-C port and a microSD card slot. The back features a glass window that reveals the tube amps, lit by a red LED erstwhile they’re active. Because, I mean, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. The SP3000T even has a pair of (virtual) VU meters you can conjure with a tap, giving it even more of that vintage hi-fi aesthetic. It’s a good touch.

The SP3000T runs on an eight-core Snapdragon 6125 processor, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and 256GB of built-in storage. You can add up to 1.5TB via the microSD card slot. It besides has dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, which supports HD codecs like AptX HD, LDAC, and LHDC. It works with Roon ARC — if you gotta ask, don’t worry about it — as well as whatever casting protocols are built into its streaming apps. It can even be utilized as a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for your computer erstwhile connected via USB-C.

Astell & Kern has its own music-focused operating strategy based on Android 10, which came out in 2019. And if you’re expecting a $3,000 music player to run at least as smoothly as a $400 Android phone, prepare to be disappointed. It stutters beautiful regularly erstwhile scrolling through lists, it frequently drops keystrokes erstwhile you’re typing, and the interface is unintuitive and buggy. Settings take besides many swipes and taps to get to, and any are plain broken: under Downloads, you can choose “default folder” or “selected folder,” but there’s no way to actually choice a folder. erstwhile I tried to log in to my Qobuz account utilizing Google, the full strategy kind of freaked out due to the fact that it sensed that I was utilizing an Android operating system, but there isn’t a way to log in to your Google account in the OS. Now I have an “Account action required” message in my notification tray that I can’t get free of.

You won’t have access to Google’s apps or the Play Store, either, though you can download a limited selection of streaming apps like Spotify, Amazon Music, and Tidal through Astell & Kern’s onboard portal (and even then, they aren’t always up to date). If you’re hoping to add your favourite podcast or news app, you most likely won’t see it there, though you may be able to sideload it. You most likely shouldn’t, though; the little vulnerability this outdated OS has to the outside world, the better.

The another large issue is battery life. Astell & Kern claims it can get up to 10 hours under certain conditions in op-only mode, but in most cases, you’re going to want to at least be in hybrid mode. I did 2 battery run-down tests in hybrid mode, with 2 different sets of headphones, and got about 4.5 hours each time. That isn’t adequate to last a full coast-to-coast flight across the US without utilizing supplemental power.

All of that adds up to make it feel little portable than it ought to be. Yes, you can take it on the go, but not super comfortably, and possibly not for as long as you’d like. It’s portable but not necessarily made for your pocket.

But nobody’s buying this thing for its operating strategy or due to the fact that their iPod kicked the bucket. They’re buying it for the sound, and the sound is sublime. The SP3000T features entirely separate systems for processing digital and analog signals, with 2 of Astell & Kern’s flagship DACs for each, which allows the right and left channels to be processed independently without interference. That effectively eliminates any possible sound between the two, which makes the player silent in between the musical notes you hear. Each strategy is in its own small silo. And due to the fact that tube amps are delicate glass bulbs, each is housed in respective layers of silicone to defend them from shock and dampen vibration. It seems to have worked due to the fact that I didn’t announcement any distortion while I was making the questionable choice of skateboarding around a parking lot with it in my pocket.

To appreciate the capabilities of a high-end digital audio player (DAP) like this, you request high-quality music sources as well as top-notch headphones. I utilized the SP3000T with both the Grado GS3000x over-ear headphones ($2,000) and the Ultimate Ears Premier customized in-ear monitors ($3,000), both of which I’ve utilized for investigating another audio devices and both of which sound incredible. I listened to a mix of downloaded FLAC, PCM, and DSD files, plus HD and Ultra HD music streamed or downloaded from Qobuz and Amazon Music.

For a listening strategy as costly as either of those setups, you would anticipate nothing short of magnificent, and the SP3000T doesn’t disappoint. Music comes across full, detailed, lively, and incredibly nuanced. If you’re coming from listening on your telephone — even with good headphones — you’re going to hear things in your favourite songs that you’ve most likely never noticed before. The scrape of a guitar pick, the subtle breath at the end of a sung line, nearly undetectable harmonics shining through. A truly well-mastered album will come across like it sounded in the studio. In all my years of investigating audio devices, I’ve never had anything transport with me rather like this (with the possible exception being the 15 minutes I spent listening to the $55,000 Sennheiser Orpheus headphones).

The differences between the digital and tube amps are striking. The digital amp is remarkably precise, with item at the forefront. It’s as clean as reproduction gets. In full tube mode, what you lose in precision (and it isn’t much), you gain in liveliness. It feels like it moves more air, so bass, snares, and vocal plosives have more presence, and it has an inviting, warm sound. The hybrid mode, however, is the best of both worlds. You get digital accuracy married with that vintage tube sound, and it carries you away. The soundstage is broad and three-dimensional, and the emotion of the music truly hits you.

For classical music, I tend to like digital, but for classical stone like Fleetwood Mac, and especially for live performances, I go full tube amp. Listening to Jimi Hendrix live in tube mode with the Grado headphones is as close as I’ll always get to proceeding what it was like to be in the audience for 1 of his shows. That said, I kept it in hybrid mode most of the time due to the fact that everything just sounds so good in it.

There are also ways to customize the sound, too. There’s an EQ (which I barely touched) and a proprietary Digital Audio Remaster option that effectively upscales lower-resolution music into either a PCM file up to 384kHz or a DSD up to 12.2MHz. That makes older recordings come to life without introducing any digital weirdness by analyzing and virtually expanding the example rate. It’s amazingly seamless. There are besides six different options for DAC filters, which change the amount of roll-off and echo, and 3 different current levels for the vacuum tubes. Half the fun is tinkering with these settings as you’re listening to find the best combination for a given track, album, or genre.

One of the most jaw-dropping experiences was listening to Lemonade on the Grado GS3000x with the SP3000T turned to Hybrid 3 and the digital remaster turning it to a DSD. It sounded like Beyoncé was standing just a fewer feet away, softly singing straight at me while another singers whispered in my ears. It gave me chills. This setup brings out the best in anything you throw at it: Jeff Buckley singing “Hallelujah,” Prince’s “Purple Rain” soundtrack, Yo-Yo Ma’s cello suites, Miles Davis, A Tribe Called Quest, Radiohead, Lizzo, Jazmine Sullivan, Led Zeppelin, beautiful much any Björk or Sigur Rós, the list goes on. These artists soar over you and engulf you in the music. utilizing the UE Premier in-ear monitors through the balanced audio jack sounds just as good, with even more precision, and erstwhile I was on a succession of 4 five-hour flights in a week, I was able to check out and go to a different sonic scenery whenever I wanted.

I besides tested the SP3000T against the FiiO M11S, a capable but much more affordable DAP that supports lossless audio and comes in around $500. Of course, music sounds wonderful on the FiiO player erstwhile listening with those Grado and eventual Ear headphones. It’s leagues better than erstwhile plugging those headphones into my telephone or computer output. But music doesn’t sound nearly as lively as it does with the Astell & Kern SP3000T. The FiiO’s OP amp just doesn’t have rather the same item or clarity, and there’s no tube amp, so it doesn’t have that lively, holographic soundstage. (Of course, it’s $2,500 cheaper. It’s a large entry-level hi-fi device, but it truly can’t go toe-to-toe with the SP3000T.)

Ultimately (and obviously), the SP3000T is for audiophiles who are comfortable spending a hefty amount of money for the incomparable experience of having a hybrid digital / tube amp in their pocket. It brings best-in-class sound that’s more customizable than any player out there. The magic is in the lively, transportive tube amps, the stunning precision of the digital amps, and the absolutely wonderful hybrid modes that bring them together. Phonic purists most likely don’t care all that much about my UI gripes, the archaic operating system, or even that it’s not as portable as 1 would hope. The sound is simply spectacular, it works flawlessly as a USB DAC, and if you have killer headphones, all of those small annoyances don’t amount to much. It’s liable to open up your music in ways you’ve never experienced. It’s enchanting.

I found myself wanting to sit my friends down, stick the Grados on their heads, and put on their favourite songs — then crank up the voltage on the tubes, just so I could see the looks on their faces as they got swept away.