Mike5215

Just picked up an Astell & Kerns AK-100 portable high res audio player. I have a new hi res set up at home as my reference system and I'm slowly building a library of 192khtz/24-Bit master quality recordings, so it's nice to be able to take them on the road.

The player is tiny but very well-built and surprisingly hefty. There's 32GB of storage on board, and two micro SD slots to add another 64GB capacity or swap in different libraries. Cost was $499 new on Ebay. originally $699 but the price dropped with the release of the new $1,200 AK 125 player with dual DACs (one for each channel) and more storage.

There's a digital 5-Band graphic EQ for fine tuning. Mine runs thru Aux In, an analog 7-Band EQ and pre-amp, and a small Fiio headphone amp. No COMAND control but better sound.

It has a nice Wolfson onboard DAC that will up-convert your low res files, but it's really built for the high res stuff. (Hi Res audio files are bit-for-bit copies of the studio master recordings at around 10X the quality of CD.) Buy high res files or download a free sampler at http://www.hdtracks.com

It supports all encoding formats (FLAC, Apple Lossless, MP3, AAC. Etc.) I also loaded the entire Beatles catalog at CD quality (44.1khz 16-Bit) and it's beautiful.

You drive a first class car. Play some first class audio in it!

dannieboiz

I hope you spent first class money on upgrading the speakers. the stock system is decent but I wouldn't call it anything audiophile.

Mike5215

Would have, but it turned out not to be necessary. The stock system is horrible but the culprit is the factory equalization in the head unit, and the lack of sound shaping controls beyond the basic Bass and Treble. The speakers themselves are fine.

I run everything through an outboard EQ, a preamp and through the Aux In jack. I did add a small powered sub to the trunk and attenuated the tweets with a bit of foam material but it's otherwise stock and sounds terrific. I spent under $100 for the EQ and related hardware. The sub was $300 but I had one on hand from my prior W220.

Regardless of the system though, improving the quality of the source material will result in better sound relative to lower resolution stuff.

If you're ever in the Gainesville, FL area come by and hear it for yourself You won't believe it's the same system.

WEBSRFR

I too am a huge fan of high resolution/lossless media but the meager storage space of the device you recommend will barely fit 1/3 my music collection. All my music is lossless but this results in much larger storage requirements. Plus does it integrate with the built in audio system so you can select artists and genres from the steering wheel controls?

Not trying to put down your solution but I think for high resolution audio you need to be able to store much more content and the ability to integrate with the car's menu interfaces is a huge benefit. I do see the benefit of being able to play better than CD quality music though so for your use I see why this makes sense. I wish we had better a solution available though.

My lossless media library is about 235 GB and what I did is upgrade an older generation iPod with a 250GB drive. Only certain older iPods allow you to do this and I shipped it some place to have this done. I love the end result though because I get to retain the lossless resolution, have all my media in one place, and be able to manage the playback with the car's controls and steering wheel buttons.

Mike5215

My error. The AK 100 has 32Gb internal and two micro SD slots at 64GB (not 32) each, for a total capacity of 96 GB. Since the SD cards are swappable one could carry a few extra micro SD cards in the car to cover a larger library. (Their newest player, the AK 240, has 384GB of capacity but it's $2500.)

However if your library only consists of lossless CD rips the AK 100 wouldn't be necessary in the first place, since your music is encoded at a (relatively) low quality 44.1khtz/16 bit. Your IPod can handle those files, plus give you the COMAND integration you like.

The much more expensive AK 100 would only be of value if you have high quality 24 bit audio files, which the IPod can't play.

Unfortunately, the AK 100 won't integrate with the COMAND on the S Class, but it does stream Bluetooth Audio, so it will integrate with the COMAND system on pretty much any other Mercedes product. In the S it's an unfortunate trade off between clean integration and better audio quality.

WEBSRFR

Thanks for the clarification. If you use BT to integrate with the car's audio system, what would be your effective bit rate because that would be limited with what the BT data stream can support?

Wouldn't you be better off with lossless 44.1khtz/16 bit audio tracks connected directly to the Mercedes audio system via the iPod interface than 24 bit audio that need to be down-sampled for BT transmission? If you use the RCA jack approach then doesn't the audio go through a degradation cycle of digital to analog conversion and then the car having to reconvert the RCA input back to digital?

I understand and appreciate the audio is 24 bit audio with this device but seems as soon as you try to interface that audio with the car, you end up loosing that quality before it gets into the car's actual audio system...

Mike5215

The heavy lifting, from a technical standpoint, that is the playback of a hi res 24 bit file, is accomplished entirely by the portable player. The resulting output of richly detailed, pristine high resolution analog audio can be heard through anything capable of reproducing sound...a set of headphones...your home audio system, or your car stereo, via either the device's 3.5mm jack or the device's A2DP Bluetooth full bandwidth output.

Both your IPod Classic's DAC and the COMAND's onboard DAC are incapable of processing files with a sampling rate higher than 44.1 khtz at a bit-depth of 16, so if you want to play anything better than CD resolution you have to bypass the car's digital-to-analog convertor entirely and pass through an analog signal from a more capable DAC.

Apples to apples over the same playback system, a given track in hi res will sound considerably better than that track as a lossless CD rip, in exactly the same way the CD rip sounds better than an MP3.

BenzV12

Thanks for the heads up and money well spent then .I have not heard of that brand but it delivers some high end quality music judging by the numbers you talked about

Mike5215

I got into it by accident. I bought an outboard DAC for the car and it came with a coupon from a website called HDTracks for a free high res download. That lead me to do some research and eventually I bought a dedicated hi res system for the house. The step up in quality on a good hi res system playing 192/24 masters is amazing.