This overlooked feature turns your portable music player into the ultimate desktop hi-fi device

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More versatile than meets the eye

Astell & Kern A&norma SR35 plugged into a laptop and headphones
(Image credit: What Hi-Fi?)

Portable music players, PMPs, DAPs, MP3 players – whatever you want to call them, these dinky, dedicated music machines will to many people seem as redundant today as car aux-cassette adaptors. Your phone can store and play music, access stored music from the cloud, and stream from any service to its heart’s content. It may not play all audio file formats or qualities, nor feed music to your headphones or connected system with the quality of a good music player – alas, that’s why they still exist! – but for most people a phone will be a good enough gateway to music playback. And that’s OK.

If you do, however, care for sound quality more than most and are on the fence about investing in such a source for your portable (and perhaps also hi-fi) set-up, perhaps I can give you that final little push over it. So, here it goes…

For a period I used an older version of the entry-level Astell & Kern player this way, as the sound-boosting middleman between my MacBook Air and wired headphones (and would still today had I not the fortune of having Chord Electronics' standalone Hugo 2 DAC). You shouldn’t expect a £500-odd (as it was) player to perform as well as a dedicated USB DAC costing the same money – just as you shouldn’t expect a £1000 phone to sound like a £1000 player – but the quality was in line with an external DAC I owned back then that was just under half the player’s asking price, and I liked how the tonal balance and character mirrored that when it operated as a traditional player.

It’s a not-too-dissimilar story with the current A&norma SR35 (£799/$799/AU$1299). As penned in our SR35 review, “that same sonic signature also shines through our favoured Grado RS1x headphones when the SR35 handily steps in as a budget-level DAC between them and a Macbook Pro. Think somewhere between AudioQuest DragonFly Red [£170/$250/AU$420] and Cobalt [£269/$300/AU$600] DAC levels.”

Becky Roberts
Becky Roberts
Freelance contributor

Becky is a hi-fi, AV and technology journalist, formerly the Managing Editor at What Hi-Fi? and Editor of Australian Hi-Fi and Audio Esoterica magazines. With over twelve years of journalism experience in the hi-fi industry, she has reviewed all manner of audio gear, from budget amplifiers to high-end speakers, and particularly specialises in headphones and head-fi devices.

In her spare time, Becky can often be found running, watching Liverpool FC and horror movies, and hunting for gluten-free cake.