Digital audio players on the move
As I write this I’m sitting in my favourite chair listening to a simply sublime vinyl record – Peace will come, Deacon Blue performing some of their best songs in an unplugged form. It’s a gloriously natural recording, the sort of record that sends shivers up your spine on a great turntable, and the SME Model 35 (below) is unquestionably one of the world’s greatest turntables. The sound through my ATC SCM40 speakers driven by Naim’s magnificent NAP350 monoblock amplifiers is all consuming, like live music it touches your soul, elevates your emotions and lifts you out of the funk of a working week.
How lucky we are to be alive in an era when it’s possible to achieve the emotional impact and sensation of live music in the home. Homo sapiens emerged on earth some 300,000 years ago, but listening to recorded music that approximates to live quality has only been possible for around sixty years. It makes you think doesn’t it? If you had been born anytime in the previous 299,900 years you’d never have been able to savour music like this at home. We are perhaps the luckiest people to have ever been alive…
Like nearly everyone nowadays though I travel a lot and when I’m away I still want to enjoy the music I love. An invitation to visit Cadence Audio’s Indian operations combined with a holiday in Goa provided the perfect opportunity to sample some of the best portable audio replay gear available. I placed some calls and pretty soon the dining table was piled high with digital audio players, headphones and Bluetooth dongles all designed to deliver superlative sound wherever you happen to be in the world. The travel gear comprised:
Astell and Kern PD10 DAP £2,499
Fiio M23 DAP £649
Focal Bathys headphones £699
Technics EAH-Z100 IEM headphones £259
Twelve South AirFly Pro 2 bluetooth dongles £69.95
SanDisk Micro SD EXPRESS 512GB memory cards £187
Here I am concentrating on the digital audio players, the headphones and dongles etc will follow in parts 2 and 3 of this music on the move special.
Astell and Kern PD10
When the PD10 arrived my first reaction was “wow – this is one impressive piece of kit”! The Astell and Kern came lavishly packaged with a simply gorgeous desk docking stand and beige faux leather case which perfectly fits the player and still permits access to all controls and sockets. The case is manufactured from beautifully machined stainless steel with a glass back, it would certainly prove an effective weapon should one be required to quell the natives.
One thing worth noting is that you can’t dock the player with the case on which is a shame. The weight of this player is striking, it certainly feels reassuringly solid and beautifully built in the hands, although you’ll certainly be aware of it when you slip it in your pocket. I noticed that some of the corners feel rather sharp and I would have preferred a more rounded feel, but this is never an issue when used in its case.
The PD10 is six inches long and weighs 435g, the gorgeous touchscreen offers an impressive 2160×1080 IPS display. The O/S is a custom Android build called Crimson based on Android 14. Cleverly the Astell and Kern will also switch between two levels of gain depending on the impedance of the headphones you plug in and even has 256GB of on board storage, which is enough for a decent sized music library. I loaded it with a high speed Sandisk 512GB Micro SD card and began copying my music library over. I have a huge amount of albums ripped to 16/44.1 FLAC as well as some downloads in WAV at up to 24/192, so this took some hours to copy, purely because I was pulling them off the NAS drive across my wireless network. Both the player and SD card are light years faster than any wireless network, so allow time for this process if you’re copying hundreds of GB or music files as I was over wi-fi.
In terms of outputs the PD offers a 3.5mm headphone output and 4.4mm Pentaconn balanced output. Charging and docking is via USB-C, while controls comprise five low profile buttons on the right side for forward, back, play/pause, volume up and down and there’s a button lock switch to prevent inadvertent selections on the left side of the unit. Boot time is around 37 seconds which I found slow, but once booted the controls feel snappy and responsive. The player offers full access to the Google Play Store and came pre-loaded with Tidal, Qobuz, and Spotify.
Everyone knows that in digital audio, the DAC has a huge impact on the resulting sound. Astell and Kern chose to fit this player with the world’s first portable implementation of the AK4498EX digital to analogue converter. This supports ultra-high-resolution formats, including 64-bit/1536kHz PCM and DSD1024. The device also incorporates Data Weighted Averaging (DWA) routing technology to minimise conversion element variation, further improving sound quality.
I began listening to the PD10 using my reference Sennheiser HD800 headphones before departure and it was clear from the first bars of Deacon Blue’s Everytime you Sleep streamed on Tidal that this player is state of the art for a portable unit. Ricky Ross and Lorraine McCintosh’s vocals were staggeringly transparent, the piano was full of texture and timbre and the song swung along with a genuine sense of momentum.
Poolside in Goa I played everything from James Bond film scores to ZZ Top’s Eliminator and the PD10 delivered music with a warm and detailed sonic signature that made even the worst recordings sound pleasant without masking their detail. Ambient cues were impressively rendered and on larger orchestral works such as the Bond scores the scale of the recording venue was beautifully conveyed. I must confess one of my greatest pleasures in life is listening to John Barry’s James Bond themes, especially the orchestral versions recorded by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra while reading the original Ian Fleming novels poolside under the swaying palms of a tropical paradise. As I sipped a beautifully mixed Whisky Old Fashioned I reflected that the life of an audio reviewer seldom gets better than this.
Fiio M23
The Fiio M23 is a very attractive mid range DAP which comes with a clear rubberised custom case which would seem to offer superior protection to the leatherette case supplied with the Astell and Kern. The player lacks the hewn from metal feel of the PD10 but still feels extremely solid and well built. My unit came in a very attractive navy blue colour. It’s glass backed and measures just under 5.5 inches long, it and weighs 299g. The M23 offers a 1440×720 resolution screen and feels noticeably lighter than the Astell and Kern in the hand. The M23 has slightly more rounded corners. In terms of controls there’s a touch sensitive volume pad on the left side beneath the hexagonal power button.
Along the right hand side are three more hexagonal buttons for back, play/pause and forward as well as a sliding control to select desktop mode on or off. With D.Mode off the battery can be charged and also supply power, while with it on the battery will not charge (thus protecting the battery when it’s plugged in) but the unit will offer higher output power to drive more difficult headphones. I did initially find this function irritating as while away in India I inadvertently turned it on and couldn’t initially understand why the battery was no longer charging!
Finally there is a hold slider which prevents inadvertent pressing of any buttons. This is especially useful because the volume slider is extremely easy to accidentally touch and suddenly the music is either too loud or too quiet. In terms of outputs the M23 offers a standard 3.5mm headphone jack which doubles as a coaxial output and a 4.4mm balanced connection.
The Fiio M23 runs a derivative of Android 13 and boot time is slower than the Astell and Kern at 43 seconds, while in use the menu selections feel slightly less snappy and responsive. The M23 offers full access to the Google Play Store but like the Astell and Kern comes preloaded with a few useful apps like Tidal and the excellent Fiio music app for replay of locally stored files.
In terms of the DAC the M23 strangely uses two. First is the AK4191EQ which performs signal modulation and Delta Sigma modulation before handing off to the AK4499EX for digital to analogue conversion. Fiio argues that this architecture splits the digital and analogue portions of the clocking thus lowering noise and improving signal to noise ratio. The 4499EX is the next generation on from the 4498EX fitted to the PD10.
Again I began by using my reference Sennheiser HD800S headphones simply because they are the most transparent and finest headphones I have ever heard. Direct comparison of the same Deacon Blue track against the Astell and Kern showed that the Fiio M23 sounded even more detailed than the PD10 with superb stereo imagery and a real feeling of standing beside the singers. While the Astell and Kern majors on slightly deeper bass extension and a generally warmer presentation across all instruments. I don’t mind admitting that I was deeply impressed with both players, they are both superb and offer astonishingly high levels of sound quality, something that simply wasn’t available when I purchased earlier generations of Fiio players for travel five or ten years ago.
There’s no denying that the Fiio is both lighter and smaller and so feels easier to slip into shorts or carry on the move between assignments. I liked it a lot and tended to gravitate towards this player, while Moneypenny, who accompanied me on the trip, preferred the warmer and richer sonic signature of the Astell and Kern.
Jonathan Gorse / Agent 008
Part 2 can be seen here