Astell & Kern Kann review: Zune resurrected

In most people’s minds, the dedicated portable media player has been consigned to the category of extinction, slotted in somewhere between the woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed cat. The smartphone reduced the Walkman to the size of an app, and only dedicated audiophiles bother to carry a physical device just for music anymore. Except something peculiar has happened recently: smartphone makers have reverted to selling phones without headphone jacks, so all of a sudden there’s a fresh opportunity for PMPs to make a comeback.

And what a comeback this is.

When I first heard about the Astell & Kern Kann, I guffawed at its size and price. This inch-thick slab of aluminum weighs in at 9.8 ounces (278g) and costs an eye-watering $999. In all honesty, I only called it in for review because of how ridiculous it seemed. The Kann has two of everything: two headphone jacks, two line-out ports, two memory card slots, and two USB ports. It's designed to provide more than anyone would need at any one time, and that includes the enormous 6,200mAh battery.

But here's the eyebrow-raising conclusion I've come to after using the Kann for more than a month: it all makes sense. There's nothing excessive about this device, not even its price, and it's all because of the way it actually works. The A&K Kann is the very definition of function-first design.

The primary advantage of the Kann, relative to any other portable music device, is that it sounds utterly sensational. I have heard Sony's gold-plated $3,200 Walkman, Neil Young's Pono Player, and Astell & Kern's own AK Jr. and AK100 II players, and not one of them has impressed me as much as the Kann. Even audiophile-grade equipment like the Chord Mojo and the desktop-bound Schiit Jotunheim that I have at home doesn't sound as musical and gorgeously melodic as the Kann. I'd go so far as to say that the Kann is the best music playback device I have — others might be purer or even more precise in their audio reproduction, but none of them upgrade the listening experience in such an instantly recognizable way. The Kann stands alone.

My standard for any audio equipment that makes claims of superior sound quality is that the superiority has to be obvious. Don't tell me to sit in the absolute center of my sound-dampened, specially rearranged living room just to get a sense of your exemplary speakers' performance. For the lofty prices usually asked, audiophile equipment should be obviously better. That's why I test primarily with 320kbps MP3 files and don't chase around for uncompressed versions of my favorite songs. The Kann can play the latter just fine, and it supports uncompressed streaming from Tidal, but I wanted to see it show a marked differences with just MP3s, and it totally delivered.

The first album I listened to on the Kann was Led Zeppelin's II, with Audio-Technica's nicely detailed MSR7 headphones serving up the tunes. It was a staggering performance, with all the explicit sexuality of "Squeeze me baby, 'till the juice runs down my leg" coming across in Robert Plant's rasping vocals. I could differentiate between deliberately distorted guitar and the occasions when Jimmy Page was more careful and precise in his strumming. But more than anything, it was the soundstage of the Kann that blew me away. It was like opening up an accordion: all of a sudden, the music I'd heard many times before was presented on a far wider and more luxurious stage, with air between each instrument and the vocals, and ample room to let me pick out minute details and acoustic cues.

My happy experience with the legendary rockers and the good but not exceptional MSR7s was only reaffirmed and amplified by expanding into other genres and other sets of headphones. When I stepped up to the Beyerdynamic Xelento in-ears, which are themselves priced at $999, it all got too much for me. I literally didn't want to move from my seat, even though this is an obviously portable music combo, because I was so transfixed by the music the Xelento and Kann were producing together. Feed Me's A Giant Warrior Descends on Tokyo EP is one of my favored ways for testing the bass on any pair of headphones, and it was just perfect. Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine sounds so good through the Kann-Xelento pairing that I no longer want to hear it any other way.

So yes, the Kann scales up in quality if you plug higher-end gear into it, but I found it superb even with the more affordable Shure SE535 in-ears and Oppo PM3 over-ear headphones. With the PM3s, I loved the natural instrumentation of Nitin Sawhney's Displacing the Priest, which definitely benefited from the Kann's expanded soundstage and seemingly boundless dynamic range. The vocals were perfectly delineated from the hand drumming and other background instruments, and the beatboxing felt organic.

The Kann just does wonders with music, and I say this having never previously been wowed by any standalone music player. They all sound good, but the Kann sounds essential. If I want to hear a pair of headphones at its best, I now reach for this silver brick first. The Kann's also versatile and can be used as a digital-to-analog converter and headphone amp plugged into a PC or Mac — I rate its performance as highly as that of a desktop amp, but it just happens to be easily portable too.

I could stop with its world-beating sound, but the Kann has other good things going for it. This player's ratcheted volume dial is a tactile delight, clicking with a mechanical noise that makes it feel like unlocking a combination lock. Yeah, I know, it seems like an unimportant little thing, but I've handed the Kann to dozens of people and they've all wanted to have that dial in their lives in some form. It's a built-in ASMR trigger (or perhaps the sophisticated audiophile's fidget spinner). One smartphone designer I spoke to expressed deep frustration at the constraints of his trade preventing him from putting something as mechanically pleasing as the Kann's jog dial in his designs.

Also awesome: the Kann's battery life. It lasted me a full working week in the Bay Area while covering Google I/O last month, and it still had enough juice to cover my six-hour flight to New York on the Saturday. A major problem holding back other good-sounding PMPs in the Kann's vicinity is that they try to be slim and run out of battery too quickly. The Kann is fat, but it's fat for a good reason. Plus, having a USB-C data and power port means I can always top it up with the same charger I use for my phone and laptop (the MicroUSB connector is for audio only).

Finally, the durability of this music player is beyond reproach. I accidentally dropped the Kann onto hard concrete from waist height (which still makes me cringe when I think about it), and only the plastic bottom picked up minor lacerations. The aluminum case shrugged off the entire thing, which is probably owing to just how much aluminum there is. Almost no expense has been spared.

Almost.

The Kann may be an exceptional new breed of PMP, but it still carries on some of the old family traits. First and most obvious is the screen, which is a 4-incher with WVGA resolution (800 x 480) and decidedly sub-par performance. It washes out easily and looks sinfully ugly sat next to a modern AMOLED display like that on the Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy S8. I consider this forgivable, especially knowing that audio companies work in such small production batches that they can't get the same economies of scale that a smartphone maker might. Also, the Kann only plays music, so in all honesty I'd have been happy even if it had a screen half the size.

What I'm not happy about is the Android-based UI on the Kann. It's reasonably streamlined, but it's awfully laggy. So I don't have to jump around too much to find my music, but the few jumps I do make invariably test my patience. Loading my album overview shows me placeholder icons for a solid three or four seconds before I see album art. Going into any album does the same thing with the art for each track. It's not good. And yet, I forgive that too, because when the music gets going and the Kann slides into my pocket, none of this visual stuff matters one bit.

Astell & Kern is the luxury sub-brand of iRiver, a Korean company that's been making MP3 players since before the iPod even existed. It's a brand that has a flagship $2,999 PMP, the AK380, and an enthusiast audience that helps it sustain such products. The portable music player hasn't gone extinct precisely because of that enthusiast community, but this new Kann model from A&K signifies something new. It has much of the AK380 greatness, including the same AK4490 converter chip, but in a more integrated and affordable package. No, it's still not a device for everyone, and I'd struggle to recommend buying this if you're in need of more practical things like a new laptop or phone, but as an indulgence or a gift, I can't think of anything better. And hey, a dedicated music player is more justifiable today, with the headphone jack-deprived iPhone 7 and HTC U11, than it has been in many years.

More than anything, the Astell & Kern Kann is a piece of technology that makes people happy. You'll be amused by how its trapezoid shape overflows your grip, you'll be happy ratcheting up its volume dial, and you'll be downright delighted by the music it makes.