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Astell & Kern AK HC5: two-minute review Astell & Kern builds some outstanding digital audio players, and the company also knows how to charge us for them. But it’s taken pity on those of us without the wherewithal, and has developed this HC5 headphone amp/DAC. It is a portable device intended to transform your bog-standard smartphone into a viable source of hi-res audio for anyone with the wired headphones good enough to take advantage of it. With high-end AKM digital-to-analog conversion components on board, Astell & Kern’s ‘digital audio remaster’ and ‘high driving mode’ technologies included, and both balanced and unbalanced headphone outputs, the HC5 is specified to get the job done. It also features half- a-dozen digital filters, as well as a huge range of volume adjustment and some slightly imprecise-feeling physical controls that serve to undermine the robust and tactile overal...

TerraMaster F4-425 Pro: 30-second review TerraMaster has been making NAS hardware long enough to know that the upgrade cycle is everything. The F4-424 Pro arrived in early 2024 with a strong hand: an Intel Core i3-N305, 32GB of DDR5, and a build that put competitors under genuine pressure. Two years on, the company returns with the F4-425 Pro, and the result is a more complicated story than a straightforward generational step forward. On the hardware side, the headline changes are meaningful. Dual 5GbE replaces the F4-424 Pro's dual 2.5GbE, which doubles the theoretical single-client throughput ceiling. The M.2 slot count increases from two to three. Both are welcome improvements that justify the refresh. But there is a wrinkle. The processor moves from the Core i3-N305 to the Intel N350. The N350 is also an 8-core chip, and its maximum burst clock of 3.9GHz fractionally exceeds the N305'...

HyperDrive Next TB5 Dock: 30-second review While docking stations are rarely the most glamorous pieces of hardware on a desk, they do offer a generation shift in connectivity that can completely transform a professional workflow. That’s the thinking behind HyperDrive Next Thunderbolt 5 Dock. Take a single Thunderbolt 5 uplink cable, and with it convert a premium laptop or professional mini PC into a modular, desktop-class powerhouse. Historically, compact Thunderbolt docks forced users to accept a hierarchy of compromises-sacrificing networking speeds, capping host charging, or forcing external storage enclosures to occupy precious downstream ports. Hyper systematically eliminates these constraints. Built around Intel's newest Barlow Ridge controller, the dock shifts dynamically between a symmetrical 80Gbps bidirectional layout and an asymmetrical 120Gbps downstream pipeline for monstrous mu...