Astell&Kern announces the PD5, an eight-DAC player with a switchable half
The successor to the SR35 carries eight Cirrus Logic converters and lets the listener run four or all eight, trading measured performance against up to 28 hours of playback.
Astell&Kern has announced the PD5, the successor to its A&norma SR35, revealed at the Hong Kong High-End AV Show from 7 to 9 August 2026. It carries eight Cirrus Logic CS43198 converters with switchable Quad-DAC and Octa-DAC modes, the first favouring battery life and the second performance, with up to 28 hours of playback quoted. It runs full Android on an octa-core processor, supports PCM to 32-bit/384 kHz and native DSD256, and adds EnviroTune, which adjusts playback according to measured ambient noise. Pricing was not announced.
A switch between four and eight converters is an unusually explicit admission that the extra hardware buys something small enough to trade away for battery. How small is precisely the sort of thing a measurement settles, and the comparison is available on one device. EnviroTune is the harder claim: adjusting playback to ambient noise means deliberately leaving the intended response, which may well be the right call on a train and is not a fidelity feature.
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This is an announcement, not a verdict. Specifications come from the manufacturer and nothing here is measured until a unit reaches the rig. For tested daps, see DAPs reviews. Back to all new releases.