Astell Kern PD10

Introduction

For many members of the general public, the need for a portable audio player – most famously embodied by the iPod – ended at the point where their smartphone was able to perform the same role. Carrying a device that only performs one role around seemed like a waste of pocket space.

This wasn’t the end of the portable audio player though. A small number of companies have continued to develop them and have turned them into something that performs a slightly different role to the portable player of old. The idea is that, as well as delivering sublime tunes when you are out and about, they can be used as a high quality digital source with your system at home.

Astell & Kern has been working on this particular use case for many of their players for many years now and they have made steady progress at making the concept something you might actually want to employ in both roles. This has mainly focused on the software side of things and very impressive those developments have been too.

The PD10 is the latest arrival from Astell & Kern and as well as harnessing all of these software refinements, it makes a key hardware change as well with a view to perfecting the ‘use at home’ part. Can it justify its formidable price tag to be the use anywhere digital source of your dreams?

Price

The Astell & Kern PD10 is available in the UK for £2,500. It’s available from a wide selection of retailers and can be ordered online should you need it to be.

In what constitutes a fairly aggressive bit of pricing, in the USA it can be purchased for $2,500 which is quite substantially cheaper than it is here. In Australia, the PD10 can be purchased for $3,000 AUD.

It is worth noting that the PD10 is towards the upper end of the Astell & Kern range (although to be clear, it’s not the top of it). A considerable amount of the software element of what the PD10 can do is available at lower price points than this one.

The Astell & Kern range is quite a complex one (believe it or not, it’s been simplified in recent years) so, if the concept appeals to you, quite a bit of what the PD10 can do can be replicated in other models.

Design

• A superb piece of metalwork…
• …but quite a heavy one
• New control interface makes more sense than before
• Docking station is ideal for home listening – so long as you have XLR connections

Astell & Kern has long been associated with high quality metal chassis on their products. The PD10 is no exception to this but this isn’t to say it’s business as usual.

Being blunt for a moment, the PD10 is a great deal less weird than some older Astell & Kern designs. There is no screen mounted at an angle (the idea was that if you held the player in your hand ‘normally’, the screen was upright in front of you but it meant holding the player just so for it to work) and no mad angled metal sections that felt like styling for styling’s sake.

Here you get a neat row of control buttons and the fitment of an easily accessible button lock that makes it a pleasure to use in a portable sense because, you don’t automatically need to power the screen up.

The level of build and finish makes the PD10 feel very special; the PD10 genuinely reaches the point where engineering meets sculpture and it feels special in a way that not a lot else at the price can easily match.

The caveat to this is that, at no less than 435g (or getting on twice as much as an iPhone 16 Pro Max), the Astell & Kern is going to need you to have a well secured garment on before you casually stick it in a pocket. This is a big and weighty object that is likely to be something that is more ‘bag portable’ than something you carry about on you.

The PD10 makes use of the  ‘Crimson’ operating system that Astell & Kern devices have been using for a few years now. This has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years and it moves with a slickness and reliability that inspires confidence in its long term stability. It’s a heavily modified Android system and this helps to make it familiar but sufficiently adapted for music use as to be effective.

Customised versions of most streaming service apps are available to install and these now extend to offering Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz Connect. As a means of listening to content on the move, the SE300 puts in a decent showing.

The big change for the PD10 isn’t on the main unit itself though. As well as the player, you get a dedicated cradle. This allows the DAP section to sit in a device that can take the audio signal from it, while charging and allowing data transfer at the same time.

With the player and dock united you have a complete front end that is a step on from previous A&K players I have tested that weren’t always happy to be charged and used over line out at the same time. The cradle is a lovely thing in its own right but the fitment of XLR as the only analogue out is annoying as not everyone will be equipped with these and thus need adapters. Nevertheless, it means you can charge and use the PD10 in a neat and completely self-contained way

Features

• All new AKM DAC architecture
• Two different internal headphone amplifiers with balanced and unbalanced outputs
• Reasonable internal storage with option to expand via Micro SD
• Respectable, if not outstanding battery life.

Over the years Astell&Kern has used DAC chips from a variety of suppliers and has also built their own ‘ladder’ type DAC. For the PD10, they have gone with AKM for decoding. Current AKM design practise is to split the decoding and processing into discrete devices rather than have a single piece of silicone perform the task – an approach that arch rival ESS generally takes.

This means that the PD10 uses both the AK4498EX DAC and the AK4191EQ in its circuit and doubles both of them up, employing four DACs and two EQ chips in total. Astell&Kern calls this approach HEXA and it’s the first player to make use of these devices in portable form. These are used in parallel to drive the different outputs on the player and it means that that the balanced connections on the PD10 are truly balanced.

These headphone outputs have access to two different headphone amplifiers which have been developed to ensure a ‘best fit’ across the very wide spread of impedance and sensitivities at work from earphones you could power off a decent cough through to electrostatic headphones with very demanding impedance figures indeed. Connect a device to the PD10 and it will automatically decide on the most suitable amp for the job.

The gain on offer looks to be sufficient for all but the most heroically insensitive devices. There is also on board adjustable EQ with space for multiple presets in case you have a few different things on the go.

There is also is a high quality Bluetooth fitment with AAC, aptX and LDAC extended codecs for wireless headphone use; a feature that I was sceptical of until I spent some time actually using it because there will be points where using the PD10 with a cabled device will still be an annoyance.

The PD10 can store your ripped files in a 256GB internal storage device and also use this memory to hold streaming service content offline which now  works reliably -something that wasn’t always a given with some older models. This isn’t a huge amount of storage capacity but it can be supplemented via micro SD card with support for up to 2TB possible.

What’s important to consider when thinking about how much storage you need is that that the PD10 doesn’t need to have content on it at all. Streaming service content can be accessed via a phone hotspot and it is also fully Roon compatible too.  

Thanks to the arrival of Roon ARC, the PD10 can (so long as a hotspot signal is present) technically run as a Roon device all the time, accessing a library that can potentially be far larger than 2.25 terabytes and that makes use of all the bells and whistles that Roon has developed to help you along.

The battery life has also been beefed up over some recent models I have tested. A 5,770mAh battery allows for 15 hours continuous playback although this quoted figure is given at a fairly low level (albeit one that is actually audible) which would suggest it is going to be a bit less in the real world. It should however be enough for most applications I can think of.

Performance

• An outstanding headphone amp over balanced and unbalanced connections
• Equally accomplished used via the cradle
• Able to rival full size streaming front ends
• Bluetooth is no less effective

If you have the good fortune to use the PD10 with a high quality pair of headphones; in this case I used Focal’s sensational Clear MG open back models via an adapter into the 4.4mm connection, you’ll be given a demonstration of just how good personal audio can be.

Listening to the magnificent reissue of Peter Gabriel’s Live at WOMAD 1982, the combination of tonal realism, detail and immersion that results is right at the top of what I have managed to extract from the Focal in the many years it has been here. It’s worth noting that this includes testing the Focal with devices that cost more than the PD10 does as well.

There is no unwanted emphasis on any part of the frequency response and no sense that anything in the recording itself is being tinkered with. What the PD10 does with exceptional consistency is get out of the way of the music and let what you have chosen to listen to and the headphones you have chosen exert their character on proceedings.

Something else that is truly exceptional is how well the Astell & Kern pushes information in front of you. This is always a challenge when the transducers are on the side of your head but listen to the opening San Jacinto and Gabriel is very definitely a presence in front of your head and not tucked to the side of it. No less impressively, when I put the £1,400 open back headphones away and used a pair of Sennheiser IE600 in ears instead, it is still able to do this.

What’s genuinely brilliant about this is that, when you pop the PD10 into the cradle (not forgetting to engage the ‘XLR’ option in the drop down menu), it moves from being a sublime personal source to a sublime digital front end. To be completely clear, even though it has been a while since I tested another A&K device, nothing in the tests I have run here suggests that the dock is able to significantly boost performance over and above running a 4.4mm to XLR cable as before but that doesn’t stop the PD10 being enormously impressive.

The continued perception of a natural and unforced performance that is extremely immersive is something that is no less present when used via the dock as it is via the headphone sockets. It is natural, tonally outstanding and superbly spacious, with the ability to grow and shrink to fit the material being played.

I have found it incredibly easy to listen to for extended periods and nothing; from the sparse loveliness of Poppy Ackroyd playing the piano to Scratch Massive churning out seismic electronica has unsettled it. What’s truly important to understand when you look at the PD10 is it isn’t ‘good for a portable player in a fixed installation’ it’s the easy equal of standalone digital sources at this elevated price point. Then, unlike all those other devices you can take it to bed and keep listening there.

What’s more, if you want to, you can break out your wireless headphones or earbuds to do so and revel in one of the best Bluetooth implementations I can remember testing. Absolute performance is going to be far more down to the headphones in use because they will be doing the decoding but the transmitter in the PD10 combines absolute stability with decent range and all the codecs you could reasonably want.

It still sounds like an odd thing to have on a device with two headphone sockets and two complete headphone amps to drive them but you could commute using the PD10 on Bluetooth before switching to a option when you get there. It’s an extra layer of flexibility on an already versatile device.

Should you buy it?

FAQs