Passion In My Pants: Astell & Kern’s AK100 portable music player

The AK100 is good-looking, powerful, and versatile: It uses a Wolfson WM8740 DAC; natively supports “Mastering Quality Sound” (MQS) files with resolutions up to 24-bit/192kHz; has 32GB of internal memory and provides two micro-SD slots, each supporting an additional 32GB of memory; offers micro USB, optical in/out, and headphone connections; and is compatible with FLAC, WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG, APE, AAC, ALAC, and AIFF files.

The user-interface was intelligent and intuitive. I scrolled through the AK100’s playlist and landed upon one of Ms. Little’s favorites—LMFAO’s hit single, “Sexy and I Know It.” I suddenly had passion in my pants: Not only was the sound clear and authoritative, but I could also easily sense the song’s inherent humor, irony, and hip-shaking attitude.

I believe John Atkinson, that sexy thing, has a unit in for review. Watch out for that.