The AK120 is a quality piece and should work well the Burmester, though I don't know about the user interface. With the DX100 there is no user interface with Burmester but that's not a problem as I will listen to an entire album before selecting another. You might encounter the same problem with the AK120.

In other words, once I've plugged theDX100 into the Burmester and select the album of choice, I can turn the volume up or down, but I can't skip tracks, albums etc.. I can however, put all of my tracks into a separate folder titled “favorites” and listen to all the music that I have pre selected, by choosing favorites in the DX100. Make sense?

The AK100 uses a wolfson dac chip whose sound characteristic is on the warm sound. If you prefer that sound you should consider the Ibasso DX50 at 1/4 the price. It also uses the wolfson dac chip and has roughly the same capabilities as the AK120.

If you haven't been there already you should check out http://www.head-fi.org/f/15/portable-source-gear/50 You will end up ruing the day that you read this post because if you are into great sounding equipment you will drop some money. I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable audiophile, but there are folks on this site that make me feel like I've just happily stumbled upon the audio equivalent of 2 tin cans and a wire. These folks go through equipment like most people go through socks. Some of the more experienced headfi nuts claim the DX100 is the very best portable sounding dap period.

The Chinese make excellent sounding daps, but their user interface is way behind.

Good luck.

 

I'm familiar with Head-Fi. I researched my portable headphone amp there, and have been thrilled with it since. (A HeadAmp Pico, if you have to know.) And I hear you on the folks out there....

I'm frustrated by the PCM limitation on quality of input you can use. I'm going to work through some translations to WAV format to use on a USB hard drive, but I'm thinking that perhaps using an external DAC might be the best way. Yes, I'm still at the mercy of the wiring from the headphone jack into the Burmester, but Porsche really just doesn't give you the greatest options.

Your coaching on the iBasso is good (same chip set as A&K, way cheaper.) What I really want is something with large capacity that I can grow with over time. The DX50 takes an SDXC card with a theoretical 2TB size limit. Right now I can only find cards up to 256GB. As you know, HD albums tend to run about 1GB per. I don't have that many HD albums now (about 50) but I don't want to have to leapfrog players over and over. So, the search continues....

BTW, it's great to have a community like this willing to weigh in on this esoterica.

 

Dude, go spam somewhere else!

Jeez, I get so tired of seeing these type of posts...

J

 

The PCM can handle 16 and 24 bit WAV files and up to 48 kHz sampling. I converted my hi-res files with XLD. The Burmester DAC is very good. There is a 10,000 song limit on the drive and it must be in FAT format.

 

That's helpful. I was starting to experiment with how high I could go with the sampling rate. I'll dial it back....