Astell&Kern A&ultima SP3000 Digital Audio Player Review

Astell&Kern has been long known to make unique and desirable Digital Audio Players (DAPs) that push both the technical and aesthetic envelope. And for its absolute ultimate models, it suitably tags them with the moniker “A&ultima.” With the new A&ultima SP3000, the company has gone all-out and created something that looks and feels like a luxury product. This combined with tech specs that would normally be at home in high-end, tabletop reference gear, makes for a very unique and special product.

Even with more and more music listeners relying on their smartphones to deliver their songs and other media (and let’s face it, smartphones have been getting better and better at it) many serious music lovers still will insist on having a separate DAP. And while not as broad and diverse as the headphone market itself, there are a fair number of DAP choices out there at several different price points. Astell&Kern has typically offered more distinctive DAPs at the upper end of the price spectrum. So, when the company offered us an opportunity for an advanced look at their newest DAP that would premiere at CanJAM SoCAL 2022, we couldn’t pass it up. The A&ultima SP3000 looks and feels like an ultimate flagship player, even in the preproduction sample form that we received for a look-see. Let’s check it out!

I used the Astell&Kern SP3000 with a variety of headphones that I had on hand, these include:

HiFiMAN HE1000v2
Dan Clark Audio Aeon 2 Noire
Beyerdynamic T5 3rd Gen
Astell & Kern T5p 2nd Gen
Beyerdynamic DT880PRO 250 Ohm
HiFiMAN HE400se
Monoprice Monolith M570
Spirit Torino Mistral BT
Mark Levinson No.5909

Our pre-production review sample arrived simply wrapped in well-padded packaging, without any sort of accessories or adornments. Even so, picking up and holding the SP3000 feels like you are handling something very special. The 904L stainless steel exterior was flawless and it had a highly polished and lustrous sheen to its finish. A nifty laser-etched graphic design adorns the backside of the SP3000.

For production, the player will come with a specially made French goatskin case. At almost 17.5 ounces the player has a heft to it and feels seriously solid. At first, I thought to myself, although beautiful, who really wants to carry around such a heavy thing just for music? And then I remembered that I used to be the teen that lugged around an original Sony Walkman Professional to listen to all my carefully curated mixed tapes because I wanted the best-sounding portable around. Yeah, I’d be that person!

Pressing and holding the large watch-crown-looking volume control fires up the beautiful 5.46-inch HD display and prompts the player’s Android-based OS to boot up. Around the base of the volume control is a lighted ring that changes color depending on the sampling frequency of the audio file being played. The general UI has changed somewhat from when my son and I reviewed the Astell&Kern Kann Cube a little while back. The GUI itself seems very responsive and a bit more intuitive and easier to navigate through, after a short acclimation period. Graphics and album art appeared razor-sharp and colorful.

In terms of processing horsepower and memory, the SP3000 uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6125 8-core CPU along with 8GB of onboard DDR4 memory. The player also comes equipped with 256 GB of (NAND) flash memory for music storage and an SD memory card slot that can accommodate cards of up to 1 TB in size.

The audio “guts” of Astell&Kern SP3000 are based around the newest flagship AKM DAC chipset, that being the new AK4499EX. The AK4499EX is actually a DAC system comprised of 2 separate pieces of silicon. First, the digital signal is fed through an AK4191EQ delta-sigma modulator chip for digital processing before being sent to the AK4499EX chip for digital-to-analog conversion. Astell&Kern claim that completely separating the digital and analog processing by using the two chips instead of a single DAC chip handling it all, results in an improved SNR. The SP3000 uses two delta-sigma modulator chips feeding four DAC chips. Each DAC chip is used in a “mono” mode, so an L and R pair of DACs handles the output to the unbalanced headphone jack (3.5mm) while the other pair serves the two balanced headphone jacks (2.5 mm and 4.4mm). Thus, the audio to the balanced and unbalanced jacks remains completely independent of each other. The company claims an SNR of up to 130dB from the balanced output. The SP3000 provides 6 digital filters to choose from to customize the sound to your liking along with a “Digital Audio Remastering” feature that allows you to upsample music files up to a PCM rate of 384kHz or DSD256. The player will support audio files up to PCM 768kHz and DSD512 natively as well as MQA audio decoding.

The headphone output jacks can also be configured as fixed-level line output jacks with selectable outputs up to 3.3Vrms unbalanced and 6.3Vrms balanced. For headphone listening, an adjustable crossfeed setting is available as well as ReplayGain which normalized the volume of all your audio content to avoid drastic volume swings between tracks. The Astell&Kern SP3000 can both transmit and receive via Bluetooth 5.0 and supports AAC, aptX, aptX-HD, and LDAC codecs. This allows the use of both Bluetooth headphones and sending audio wirelessly from your smartphone to the SP3000 for playback. The SP3000 can connect to your home’s network using the built-in Wi-Fi, allowing streaming from a variety of online sources (using bespoke apps), firmware updates, and eventual ROON compatibility (the SP3000 completed ROON READY certification just after the review sample was returned).

As you can tell the Astell&Kern SP3000 looks to be an extremely robust and capable DAP, clawing at the bleeding edge of what is possible in a portable music player.

Even though Astell&Kern were nice enough to include a wide variety of tracks preloaded into the SP3000’s memory, I connected the player to my computer via USB cable and transferred a few dozen tracks (via simple drag-and-drop) that I was very familiar with to better gauge the sound quality of this very special DAP.

So, cutting right to the chase here, I found the subjective sound quality of the SP3000 to be exceptional with whatever headphones I connected to it. The sound signature of this DAP was very smooth and very appealing. I found no issues in listening to music for extended periods without becoming disinterested or fatigued. The new AKM DAC architecture seems to be living up to the company’s “Velvet sound” moniker. The SP3000 sounds at least as good as the venerable KANN CUBE that I had helped previously review which is saying something as that DAP sounded and measured like a tabletop piece of HiFi gear. I elected not to bench test the SP3000 as my time with it was limited and the review sample was a preproduction unit. I informed Astell&Kern that I would be happy to bench-test a production sample when they had one available.

Experimenting with the different digital filter options and upsampling features resulted in the subtlest of differences. Subtle enough that I kept to the default filter choices and left upsampling off for most of my listening. The SP3000 provided plenty of power to drive both my HiFiMAN HE1000v2 and even my Beyerdynamic DT880PRO 250 Ohm to beyond-comfortable levels with the single-ended output. Having the extra drive afforded by the available balanced outputs was welcome and gave me more options to play with different cans, and I took advantage of it whenever I could. The HE1000v2, AK T5P 2nd Gen, and Beyerdynamic T5 3rd Gen all packed a little extra punch through the balanced connection. I felt that the HiFiMAN open-back cans particularly appreciated the extra jolt of juice.

But beyond the standard wired connection, Wireless Bluetooth playback is also an option with the SP3000. I had just wrapped up reviewing the Mark Levinson No.5909 Wireless ANC headphones and I decided to give them a try with the Astell&Kern. The headphones paired up easily with the player via a high-quality LDAC connection and soon the No.5909 was giving me a playback quality that was as close to a wired-quality connection as I’ve experienced over the air.

I ran the gambit of music genres in my listening from Rock, Metal, Jazz, Classical, and a little Salsa for good measure. I could pick a few of my favorites and tell you how they sounded but honestly, it would be pointless. Everything I listened to through this player sounded exceedingly good. I even tried a few MQA tracks to confirm the “origami-file-unfolding-voodoo” was properly done, and sure enough, it was. And it’s not this situation of the SP3000 being so good and revealing that I’m hearing nuances in my favorite music for the first time. We are so beyond that in this day and age with the caliber of DAPs out there. No, the SP3000 played everything I ran through it with appealing and almost addictive sound quality and let every headphone I tried with it perform at its peak capabilities. It has no discernible weaknesses, save for only having 10 hours of battery life on a full charge. Yet for a portable player packing this kind of power, it’s somewhat understandable. I would love to bench-test it and analyze its distortion profile. If I had to make a guess, I would say it is tuned with a slightly higher balance of 2nd over 3rd order harmonics to make it sound so smooth and appealing but not anywhere near to the point of producing some muddled, “tubey” sounding nonsense. In the end, It sounds amazing, is built like a tank, and looks like a piece of fine jewelry. It is the Sony Walkman Professional of our time, but with so much more capability to enjoy your music however you want and in the best way possible.

If you are serious about your portable headphone listening and demand the very best, Astell&Kern happily offers it to you in the form of the A&ultima SP3000 DAP.

The Astell&Kern A&Ultima SP3000 is like having the portable audio equivalent of a high-performance luxury sport sedan in your jacket pocket. It’s heaver, has all the bells and whistles (more than you can count in many respects), is built to an impeccable luxurious standard, is intuitive to use, brimming with technology, and with a particular focus on edge-of-the-apex performance. It is a thing of both sonic and physical beauty and as such you will pay dearly for it. It is not meant for someone who merely wants a good quality DAP. It is for the audio enthusiast who demands the very best on all counts. Does its price and position cause it to suffer the pitfall of being just another pretentious status symbol consumer product? Go out and listen to one and then give me your answer. As far as I’m concerned, it is the finest portable digital audio player I have ever come across.

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Indeed.