Astell and Kern launched a portable audio decoding amp, with dual DAC chips, and more

South Korea’s Avery and its HiFi maker Astell & Kern today launched a portable linear audio decoder ‘little tail’, model PEE51. This product is furnished with an integrated Type-C cable and built-in dual CS43198 DAC chips.

The product value is 149 US dollars or about 970 yuan. This product inherits the angular design of the AK brand, and the shell is made of zinc alloy. The decoding amp body has no buttons, only an indicator light.

Compared with Astell & Kern’s player products that cost tens of thousands of yuan, the price of this decoding amp is very close to the people. Astell & Kern launched a portable audio decoding amp: dual CS43198 DAC, about 970 yuan.

This product is equipped with a low-power DAC chip CS43198 from Cirrus Logic that is very common in decoding amps and players on the market. This chip supports DSD256 and 32bit/384kHz hard decoding, with a high signal-to-noise ratio and very low power consumption, making it more suitable for small devices.

The product utilizes a dual-chip design that can increase output power and separation. This decoding headphone amplifier uses a six-layer PCB, equipped with customized micro-resistors and tantalum capacitors. The circuit design is specially optimized to ensure a stable power supply and pure sound quality.

This product is not only equipped with dual DAC chips, but also an independent headphone amplifier chip. The output level is up to 2Vrms, the output impedance is 2Ω, the signal-to-noise ratio is 118dB 1kHz, and the THD+N is 0.0004%.

According to the official, this product has warm sound quality, excellent resolution without distortion, and was developed using Astell&Kern’s rich audio design experience. But the official has not declared the maximum output power and other information.

By looking at the wire, Astell & Kern PEE51 is equipped with a custom shielded silver-plated wire with aramid fiber reinforcement in the middle. There is a dense shielding layer on the outside of a single wire, and the wire core adopts a 0.3um copper silver-plated wire core. This design is beneficial to shielding noise and ensuring stable signal transmission.

This product utilizes a Type-C interface, supports Android phones and Apple, Windows computers, and does not support iOS devices temporarily. The decoding amp weighs 25g and supports updating the firmware.

The official reminder is that since the product does not have a volume adjustment function, it is necessary to manually adjust the volume at the front end when connecting some players to avoid damage to hearing and earphones caused by the maximum output volume.

(Via)