It's a familiar story: a shiny new kid appears on the block and the old guard receives a heavy discount. However, while a successor to the Astell & Kern A&norma SR15 has been announced in the form of the A&norma SR25, the SR15 remains a coveted piece of kit. It's a What Hi-Fi? 2019 Award-winner, no less.
While it recently dropped to £429 at Amazon, its price has now plummeted further to £399 at Amazon and Audiovisual Online. That isn't only 33 per cent less than its original price tag, it is the lowest price it's ever been.
The SR15 is a portable music player with dual DACs, 3.5mm and balanced 2.5mm headphone outputs, 64GB built-in storage (expandable via microSD card), and built-in Bluetooth, wi-fi and Tidal.
The A&norma sports a really good interface and support for native DSD playback (up to DSD64) in addition to PCM files up to 24-bit/192kHz. It will also happily deal with downsampling any music you've managed to find of even higher resolution.
Under review, we called the SR15 "an extremely appealing all-rounder" – and that was when the product was £200 more expensive. At this price, it'd be rude not to consider it if you fancy treating yourself to a top-notch portable music player. You could soon be taking hi-res music out for your daily exercise.
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