Astell&Kern - AK USB-C Dual DAC Cable

IF YOU’RE LOOKING to use headphones to listen to music on your PC or laptop, bear in mind that the socket only uses the internal sound card and so is unlikely to offer decent quality.

The solution is to bypass this by using an external DAC and headphone amplifier. If you intend to listen to music on a laptop while out and about, you’ll want a solution that is compact as well. Enter the AK USB-C Dual DAC cable, which is USB-powered and ticks all these boxes.

Employing bespoke designed capacitors, the audio circuit has been optimised to suppress power fluctuations for stable operation under a variety of conditions. There are two Cirrus Logic CS43198 DACs, which support up to native DSD256 and 32-bit/384kHz. The output from the DACs feeds an independent analogue amp with a no-load output level of 2V RMS, which is designed to drive a variety of high-impedance headphones. The output is via a 3.5mm stereo socket.

No dice for iOS

The device will work directly from a USB-C connector on an Android smartphone, Windows 10 PC, tablet PC or MacOS computer, but sadly not on iOS-based devices, such as iPhone or iPads.