Astell&Kern Launches New R-2R DAP and IEMs at High End Munich 2023
Apr 20, 2024 at 1:11 AM Post #721 of 721
Picked up an SE300 in Tokyo around Xmas — excellent sounding DAP. First A&K product but won’t be my last. Really impressed.

A few questions / suggestions would love to get some feedback on.

1. As others have requested, can we get an 80% charge limit / USB DAC mode charge disable? Would be great to extend the battery lifespan that way.

2. Is the DSD path direct or is there a DSD->PCM conversion?

3. Does anyone know of any ASR/L7-style measurements of this thing? Again, I think this thing sounds great but am really curious what kind of linearity they’re getting from the resistor ladder.

I have seen the brief measurements posted in this thread (from a Japanese blog).

Thanks in advance for any responses

I'm going to answer some of my own questions here. I have an ADI Pro 2 FS BE that I use for room correction so I pulled it out of the stereo and did some basic measurements last Sunday.

Not definitive but it appears the SE300 does DSD->PCM conversion. The measurements for DSD and DXD are virtually identical (NOS) and there's no mention of a separate DSD pathway. There's also an FPGA available for this in the design.

(I like to use HQPlayer on devices with a dedicated DSD pathway to 'bypass' the DAC. Makes very little difference here.)

Measurements for both of the above are marginally cleaner than 44.1k NOS. At 44.1k distortion products on a 1k sine test produced the pronounced 'grass' you've likely seen on other R2R DAC tests.

I was able to get <= 0.006% THD+N in my measurements, as stated by A&K. I was not able to get the same SNR but I'm 100% that was user error on my part.

Class A measured a little better than AB.

I was not able to do any linearity measurements.

Take this all with a grain of salt. I'm not experienced at testing audio gear and I wasn't getting sensible SNR results. I was, however, able to measure some other gear I have with published measurements which suggested the distortion measurements I was getting were accurate.

To be clear, I do not consider this a flawed design because it doesn't measure as well as a $99 CS43131 dongle. I have a bunch of audio gear and the SE300 is my go-to most of the time. Measurements are part of the story.
 

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