Astell&Kern's high-end Hi-Res Audio players are sensational things, but they're also way beyond my budget. So I'm pleased to see a huge discount on its most powerful player, the KANN Ultra, taking a whopping £600 off the usual price.
The deal is available from a range of retailers, including Richer Sounds, with Amazon soon to list it too. It takes the award-winning player down from £1,599 to just £999.
The KANN Ultra is an impressive piece of engineering, barely bigger than a smartphone but packing serious power output, it delivers desktop-class performance. It's also built like a tank.
Astell & Kern calls its design theme "forceful impact" and says it represents "primal power through a solid chunk of metal" – a true audiophile bargain with almost 40% slashed off the price.
Astell & Kern KANN Ultra: key features
There are four gain modes here, with the most powerful delivering a whopping 16Vrms. That means you can drive a huge range of headphones including the most power-hungry, and Astell&Kern promises up to 11 hours of playback, thanks to the large 8,500mAh battery.
The Ultra also boasts a Triple Output Mode that delivers separate amplification and processing for the Headphone Out and Line/Pre-Out ports, bypassing the headphone amp for those ports in Pre-out and Line Out modes. That latter option delivers audio directly from the DACs to an external audio device with very low noise.
The DACs are ES9039MPRO with support for up to 32-bit/768Hz playback and native DSD512. And the device also has Digital Audio Remaster technology to take lower quality audio and make it sound better.
This is a seriously impressive Hi-Res Audio player, and the current deal makes it even more attractive to those of us whose audio ambitions are a bit bigger than our bank balances.
If you're looking for a high-spec go-anywhere player this one's definitely worth investigating.
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