Source: Press Release, Last Accessed: 2015/04/24

Astell&Kern, announced its newest player, the entry-level AK Jr, which will be available soon for $499 and it will feature 64GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot for a total capacity of 128GB of music storage.
Henry Park, CEO of iriver, parent company of Astell&Kern, said “Since Astell&Kern entered the marketplace over two years ago with the highest quality portable hi-res audio player; it has been our desire to bring the same true studio sound to the masses. Today is that day. We are proud to announce that we accomplished that in the AK Jr, an entry level portable hi-res audio player that performs just as the artist and engineer heard the music in the studio.
The AK Jr features a single Wolfson WM8740 DAC and an unbalanced 3.5mm headphone jack with an output impedance of 2 ohms, powerful enough to drive a wide range of high-end headphones and IEMs. With a 3.1-inch LCD touchscreen, the AK Jr provides plenty of space to display your music information. The new player supports a wide range of digital audio files, including 24-bit, up to 192kHz PCM and single-rate DSD (converted to PCM) high-resolution audio, as well as the most popular Apple lossless formats in addition to many other lossy music formats users may currently have.
The AK Jr joins Astell&Kern’s current lineup of audiophile-grade portable hi-res audio players, the AK100 II, AK120 II and the flagship AK240. These three players feature upgrades from the AK Jr including single and dual DAC Cirrus Logic 4398 chipsets; single and double-rate DSD playback (native DSD playback on AK240, DSD to PCM conversion on the AK100 II and AK120 II); 3.31-inch high-resolution AMOLED screens; unbalanced and balanced analog outputs that allows the user to use virtually any headphone or earbud on the market and Wi-Fi connectivity to download music wirelessly to the player from a computer or network storage device and provides the ability to wirelessly stream music to the player without downloading music to the player first.
All four players include the ability to use the portable player as a USB DAC, allowing the owner to connect it to their computer to bypass their internal sound card and get high resolution sound from their PC or Mac desktop or laptop.

For more information: http://www.astellnkern.com/

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