The Astell & Kern Acro CA1000 is the Swiss Army Knife of desktop audio. Because not only is it a headphone amp, it's a music player too, with multiple inputs and a quad-DAC array. And now it's discounted by 70 per cent, dropping by £1450 to just £549 at Amazon.
Astell & Kern Acro CA1000 deal
So what do you get with the product that Astell & Kern bills as its own little "head-fi hero"? For a start, you're receiving a headphone amplifier with a digital audio player combined into a single unit, with the 10cm player essentially rising from the main amplification console and tilting up to 60 degrees for easy access. A&K's excellent portable hi-res players are generally exceptional, so you're not getting a dud here, either.
The headphone amp can drive high-impedance cans with an output of 15Vrms or lower, and comes equipped with a range of connectivity options – 3.5mm and 6.35mm unbalanced alongside 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced outputs – for handling a broad spectrum of models.
Internally, the Acro CA1000's quad-DAC offers what A&K describes as "a clear, detailed and balanced sound", whereas the variety of digital and analogue connections "ensures it can be at the heart of any hi-fi set-up". With support for high-resolution audio playback up to native DSD512 and 32bit/384 kHz, it certainly could be.
We're big fans of Astell & Kern's hi-res players, with the Korean brand dominating our list of the finest models for a good while now. In fact, whenever an A&K product drops out of said list, it's usually only to be replaced by one of its newer, shinier cousins. Any deal on one of their models should be considered, but one that slashes the cost by 70 per cent at Amazon? That sort of generosity demands further investigation.
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