The first (or one of the first) reviews of the new A&K SR35. I had an iRiver device years ago but have no experience with modern A&K products. This seems like a mediocre review at best.
Keep in mind that there is no way to install or use ARC.
Reads like a positive review to me. I have one on order, I’ll try to remember to come back and post thoughts once I’ve had it for a while.
I asked A&K directly about ARC. They said: “To drive Roon ARC, the role of the CPU is important, so it is necessary to review several things. Due to this situation, the update schedule for Roon ARC support is undecided.”
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I had an iRiver many moons ago. Also had an A&K for a week it went back. They are overrated in every way, outdated tech and awful ui and too locked down.
Bloom is an A&K reseller - it’s their primary DAP brand. They aren’t going to outright flame the device or the manufacturer. They were very careful with their language around UI performance. They had trouble driving headphones that other DAPs in the price range are capable of driving. They literally strapped an external amplifier to the device.
There is certainly real positive sentiment in the review but, considering the source, I would expect that. Overall, though, it felt like a shoulder-shrug of a review. We might be reading it differently from one another but I’d say they gave it a 6 out of 10.
I find myself curious about A&K DAPs - the high price suggests a premium product. The marketing is phenomenal compared to what we see from FiiO, HiBy, Shanling, iBasso, etc. But when you look deeper, it’s a strange story they tell. Frustratingly slow UI, closed Android, a limit to the number of allow-listed apps you can “side load”. I don’t think they’re for me.
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I actually prefer the idea of closed Android, and understand their wish to make sure everything works as they want on their devices. But I’ve not owned a DAP since who-knows-when, so we’ll see. I’ll definitely be checking out the speed of the UI. Was tempted by the SR25Mkii for quite a while…
You can’t run Roon remote on it by the way. It’s Roon Ready but they don’t whitelist the app. So you will have to use your phone to control it for Roon. That said I do this for my Fiio but just because I tend to be using it at the time but I can use the app as well on it if I want.
Thanks for saying this. I wondered if that was the case.
I understand the “closed system” perspective. My KEF LS 50s and my Naim Uniti Atom HE are closed. Personally, I find that a DAP is different.
Some of what I do on my FiiO M11 Plus:
- Wavelet for system-level EQ
- Roon Remote for controlling Roon playback on the device itself
- USB Audio Player Pro
- 1Password (dedicated account for DAP related things - otherwise a pain to enter long, unique passwords for streaming services)
- DS File (auto sync my local library to the mSD card in the DAP)
- ZeroTier
All of this runs perfectly well with no impact to sound quality or other detrimental effects. I get the closed system thing, it’s just very much not for me.
First thoughts: sounds great, nicely built, needs more apps (I want BBC Sounds, Roon Arc and a podcast app), and there are Android imperfections (eg downloading PDF covers/booklets etc in Qobuz is impossible and “breaks” things, and you are warned against accidentally watching 1080 videos which apparently may break the hardware!).
It definitely isn’t smooth or snappy but that doesn’t really bother me. However I’d like it to remember where I was when I turn it off, as for me this unit is mainly about offline Qobuz, but I have to navigate past a screen showing Tidal and YouTube every time I boot it up - why can’t I just remove those two pre-installed and unwanted services at the very least?
This may sound critical but most of the above can be fixed in software, hope they do as fundamentally (as I began), it sounds lovely and I do like the whole closed OS DAP concept.
Do you, though? 
Strangely, yes! I want to listen to music on a music device, but they seem to have lost their nerve / not got the development skills to properly “hide” Android from the user and just provide a fully rounded music listening experience. Having to return to my phone to read a digital booklet is ridiculous, and I bet it’s the same on their DAPs costing thousands too.
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Yes they are all the same, why hide Aandroid no point it. Fiio fully open Android and it doesn’t get in the way of anything or me enjoying music. Sounds fantastic you can have any music app you want. Use what ever software to copy music to it if you use local playback. I can copy direct from my NAS so easily. Download anything to it. It works really well as a music only device , extremely stable Roon experience as well as other apps.
I get it. If the priority is “I don’t want Android” then you’re going to have to go with something that tries (imperfectly) to hide that from you. If that leads you to the SR35, and the very lower performing CPU it’s built around, then you’re also going to have to live with the limitations A&K imposes on the number and choice of apps. That applies to now and the future.
There are comments on other forums around how A&K hasn’t yet certified ARC because of concerns about CPU usage. We’ve heard rumors that ARC might someday support on-device DSP so, if A&K is actually concerned about CPU, it might even be about issues that might arise with additional capabilities in the future. The same issues could be blocking them from allowing Roon Remote. It’s hard to say.
The point here is that “closed” isn’t just an attempt to provide an end-to-end differentiated, Android-hiding experience. It’s a strategy for shipping low-power devices and limiting what the user is able to do with them. That just doesn’t work for me - I’d hit walls immediately.
In any case, I don’t have any investment in devaluing your purchase or anything like that - we just all make choices about what works for us. And strangely, even after all of what I’ve written, I still kind of want an SR35 because I’ve come to appreciate its size and battery life. I don’t think I’ll get one, though.
Yeah, of course we do! And overall I like it - it’s more the user experience glitches than its CPU that irk me. Have to say though that the SP3000 is also “closed” but presumably not an underpowered CPU? So I think the closed nature is about more than just disguising a low-powered CPU. And you’re right - size and battery life are attractive (and build/look, for me). So far overall it’s a 7/10 from me…
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Hi! New to Roon and was suggested purchasing Roon by a fellow forum member on another forum site. I purchased this device and received it about seven days ago and love it. I was told by my other fellow forum member who has a DAP with a Snapdragon 665 SOC, struggles with Roon Arc. I decided on the SR35, which very few people seem to realize, is that it has the same AMP section as their flagship SP3000. The quad DAC chip used is the same used in the Topping D30 Pro, which was rated as one of the top 20 best S/N ratio (tied 8th) on ASR out of over 200 in 2021. Given this combo, the SR35 should sound similar to their $3600 SP3000. This is given that for ME, and I emphasize me, I can’t tell the difference between a lot of midfi and hifi Dacs and focus more on the amp section of the DAP. I have a very long user experience review on another forum site. I don’t know if we can link to other forums here so I won’t link to it here.
I have 23 day still to return this device but for me the SR35 is a keeper. There are some negatives of this Dap but it is greatly outweighed by the sound which I love. So far using it as a Room endpoint has been seamless but still testing. I’ll post the results once I’ve gone through everything with it.
I’d love to see your long user experience, which site did you post it on please? 
Hi Carbon, here is the link. LINK
I wrote it in a few parts, just scroll down for Roon playback. Still testing, I’m having issues because I have T-Mobile Home internet, which is not allowing me to stream Roon to my phone outside of my network. If I get Roon it’s gonna likely require me to get a different internet service provider.
This seems suspicious to me. Many of us use DAPs based on Snapdragon 660s that run ARC just fine (at least with respect to CPU). The A&K SR35 uses a much lower spec SOC processor and, by policy, ARC is prohibited. If CPU is your concern, or you ever want to run ARC, the SR35 is an odd choice. The folks from A&K have suggested that ARC is under review but that they are concerned that the processor will be underpowered for it.
I think you may be misunderstanding how Roon works. The Roon Remote client and the Roon Ready tech on your SR35 only work on your local network. It is possible, on some devices, to get them to work outside of your local network by doing complicated things with VPN solutions such as ZeroTier. That won’t apply to the SR35 because you can’t install the ZeroTier client.
The best way to use Roon outside of your local network is ARC, which again, you can’t use on your SR35.
I heard this community was very helpful and friendly but you stating I’m suspicious has caught me a bit by surprise. I really don’t see why my comment is suspicious at all. You can go to my link I posted above and see someone say the following, you can use the CTRL F function on your keyboard. Here’s the link and you can search my posts on that sight and see my journey on why I choose the SR35.
LINK
The person that introduced me to Roon said the following:
“And a mobile device capable to deal with the demands hardware wise. As far as DAPs are concerned this translates to at least a Snapdragon 665 SOC. My DX320 eg handles Roon Arc without ease. Even better is a high-end mobile phone no older than ~2 years…”
I spent a lot of time testing settings for the SR35 and hoped it would help people make a choice and not make people feel suspicious, but whatever. As I stated I still have a few weeks to return the SR35 but am very happy with it and don’t have plans to return it. I never stated I wanted the SR35 to use Roon Arc, not once. I even stated above that If I did a higher end DAP doesn’t run it well anyways according to a person that introduced me to Roon, so no lose to me on that front on getting an SR35. So I don’t know why you assumed that. If you actually read my post in the link that would be pretty obvious that I do a pretty detailed analyzes on the software of the SR35 and I gave pros and cons of each test I ran.
I can use ARC with my mobile phone just fine and attach that to my phone with a USB cable or wireless using the bluetooth DAC, so yes, it can be used remotely, just not by itself.
Lastly the issue with T-Mobile Home internet has nothing to do with the SR35. Here’s a link to that if you’re curious. Link I’m actually switching service providers this weekend because I am thinking about purchasing the Roon life time subscription and hope to be a positive contributor to this community.
You misinterpreted what I said. I was not making a comment about you being suspicious as a person. Just that I don’t think that there would be issues using ARC on a DAP based on a Snapdragon 660. The Snapdragon 660 is a powerful processor. It’s specs are here: Snapdragon 660 Mobile Platform | Qualcomm
I think it would be fine running ARC.
Hopefully you can understand that my intent wasn’t to raise questions about you as a person or about your efforts to document your experience with the SR35.
It wasn’t clear to me from your earlier posts that your comment about using Roon away from your home was about a mobile phone and not the SR35. You didn’t mention this - it seemed to me like you were trying to use the SR35 outside of your network and had attributed your issues to T-Mobile. I’m glad that’s not the case.
Anyhow, I hope you understand what I’m saying here and that I didn’t intend to make you personally feel insulted.
CPU is not the limiting factor with ARC system memory is. Most DAPs don’t have lots of ram. My M11 runs on a 660 and runs ARC perfectly fine. Nice and smooth to operate and sounds great even given the current limitations.