Astell&Kern’s A&futura SE300 Titan is a metal musical marvel

Grade 5 Titanium is a regular sight in aerospace engineering, but it’s now having a bit of a moment in the tech world courtesy of a certain fruit-flavoured smartphone company. Now Astell&Kern is getting in on the action, with a limited-run SE300 Titan hi-res music player made of the tough stuff.

While the iPhone 15 Pro has mainly swapped from stainless steel to titanium in order to keep weight to a minimum, A&K reckons it gives the A&futura SE300 Titan better resistance to heat and electrical interference than the regular aluminium version. That should let the internal analog amplifiers and R-2R DACs sing as distortion-free as possible, for the best possible sound quality.

The Korean audio experts have added wave-like patterns to the sides for a bit of added visual oomph, and machined the side-mounted volume dial using the same techniques as boutique watchmakers, making it part design statement as well as part music machine.

The bespoke DAC can handle 32-bit/384kHz playback over PCM, and supports DSD256 stereo sampling. Everything is controlled using the 5.46in, Full HD touchscreen up front, with a big enough battery to last for around 12 hours of lossless FLAC playback.

As you’d expect for a top-tier music player, the SE300 Titan is stuffed with goodies including balanced 2.5mm and 4.4mm outputs, and an unbalanced 3.5mm (which doubles as an optical out) for wired listening. There’s aptX HD and LDAC Bluetooth wireless support, 5GHz Wi-Fi for streaming services and 256GB of flash memory for storing tracks offline. It’ll swallow a 1TB microSD card if you’re running low on room, too.

The regular A&futura SE300 would already set you back an eye-watering amount of cash, and Grade 5 Titanium only bumps the SE300 Titan’s price up further. Well-heeled audiophiles should expect to pay around $2499/£2299 when it goes on sale later this year, direct from the Astell&Kern website.

• Related: What is LDAC / LHDC? The audio codecs explained