Astell & Kern

Astell&Kern is the ultimate digital music source that brings you Mastering Quality Sound or MQS. Astell means ‘Stars’ in Latin and Kern means ‘Center’ in German. We believe Astell&Kern is the center of music.

Original music performances recently have been captured in digital almost exactly as they were performed due to new and advanced recording technologies currently available. These great-sounding recordings are mainly listened to in inferior sound formats, such as MP3 or streaming services. With the debut of the MP3 format, music lovers scarified the quality of the sound for the convenience of being able to carry their music collection wherever they went. Because MP3 heavily compresses the original file for the sake of convenience, you only hear inferior vocals and instruments, and the full soundstage and ambience from the original recordings is missing. The movement of the original performance often disappears when listening to compressed MP3 music. After agonizing over these issues, Astell&Kern was our solution to the poor quality of musical sound for the sake of portability, and our way to ultimately bring back the original sound quality of the music, MQS, back to music artists, recording engineers and professionals.

Astell&Kern pursuit is to provide the natural and original sound without distortion. It offers almost the exact presence with tiny details you wouldn’t have noticed from other music systems by playing back high-resolution music bit for bit, exactly as it was recorded. The exact sound without missing any bit of the live performance in recordings is what Astell&Kern is known for.

The power of true sound from Astell&Kern has been experienced and also from famous audio exhibitions around the world. Astell&Kern is now admired by music lovers from many countries, including USA, China, Japan, UK, France, and many more around the world.