As some of you may already know, Astell&Kern recently released official firmware 1.30 for the SP3000 series.
AKCFW for the SP3000M was developed using official firmware 1.24 as its baseline. As a result, AKCFW is not compatible with the newer 1.30 firmware, and I currently have no plans to rebase the project onto this release.
Why not update the baseline?
I've compared the changes between official firmware 1.24 and 1.30, and the differences are relatively minor. More importantly, several longstanding issues in the official firmware remain unaddressed.
One minor identified change in firmware 1.30 is DSD support from 64 to 128. This is at the expense of battery life - I don't believe you are going to miss it.
Since day one, AKCFW has focused on going beyond incremental vendor updates, introducing meaningful bug fixes, performance improvements, usability enhancements, and additional functionality.
At this point, rebasing onto 1.30 would introduce unnecessary development overhead without delivering meaningful benefits to AKCFW users.
What changes for AKCFW Companion?
For those planning to install AKCFW on the SP3000M (and eventually the SP4000), I'll be releasing a revised version of AKCFW Companion.
Currently, Companion contacts Astell&Kern's servers to retrieve the official firmware package used as the foundation for building AKCFW.
Unfortunately, Astell&Kern does not maintain a publicly accessible archive of previous firmware releases. Instead, the existing download package is replaced whenever a newer firmware becomes available.
This creates a compatibility issue when the firmware available on A&K's servers no longer matches the baseline expected by Companion.
The revised Companion will address this dependency and change how the required baseline firmware is obtained and validated.
What does this mean for you today?
If you're attempting to deploy AKCFW on your SP3000M for the first time, Companion may report that the firmware package retrieved from Astell&Kern's servers does not match the expected baseline.
This is expected behavior, not an indication that anything is wrong with your player.
Companion is correctly identifying a firmware mismatch and preventing an incompatible package from being used.
Until the revised Companion is available, please don't attempt to bypass this validation or substitute firmware packages manually.
Moving forward
My priority remains improving AKCFW rather than repeatedly chasing official firmware version numbers, particularly when those releases offer little that isn't already addressed or improved upon in the custom firmware.
I'll share more details about the revised Companion once the changes are ready.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns about compatibility or installation, feel free to send me a private message.
Thanks for your continued support!
— Adam