Astell & Kern A&norma SR25 MKII

[What Hi-Fi?]

Astell & Kern’s latest ‘entry-level’ music player is better than ever, with a price tag to reflect that.

Astell & Kern A&norma SR25 MKII : Read more

 

[Tromatojuice]

I've spent a few weeks with the player, and it fits some of my needs. I'm a HiFi neophyte, so I my take on the sound specs would not be very relevant (let's leave it at "I love the sound of it on all my albums: metal, pop, country, hip hop etc.).

A couple of things I could live without:

1. the player doesn't seem to handle multi-disc albums properly (basically, it crushes the disc tags, and plays it in whatever order it feels like, which is not necessarily the order the track are displayed on the device);
2. the player handles SSD rather strangely, making it read-only and mishandling some of the metadata associated to the tracks;

One thing that's just not acceptable from a high-end brand: their support sucks. It's awful, unhelpful, and when they decided your problem is solved (even when it's not) they'll stop answering.