Yes. Fuck that. But hey, If people want to spend their money on the product, that is fine by me. It’s their money. I’ll be looking elsewhere, and that is OK too. Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing. In a time where an uninformed, demented old tyrant wants to take more of our freedom away every day, I say let those folks do what they desire.
They don’t look all that bad, actually. Maybe at some point there will be a review.
And by the way… GO BILLS! I would love to see these guys shock the world and win the whole damned thing.
GO BILLS, indeed! Only my wedding day and the birth days of my children would be happier days in my life than the day upon which the Bills finally hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
A&K announces their ACRO CA1000 headphone amp with built-in media player. the media player is non-removable, but the whole thing is designed with mobility in mind as it has an 8400mAh battery that is supposed to around 10 hours of playback. it weighs just shy of 1kg.
the screen is 4.1" in size with 720p resolution. it has ‘dual band’ AC WiFi and Bt5.0 for streaming and 256GB of storage to hold some of your music library and can expand a further 1TB via mSD card… It has a ESS ES9068AS Quad-DAC configuration and can do up to DSD512. for connections, 2.5mm and 4.4mm Pentacon for balanced and 3.5mm / 6.35mm for SE. oh, and MSRP is $2100.00 USD.
note that the listed specs are all based on low gain setting.
now a question. does A&K equipment actually perform so well to merit their prices or are they like B&O and while work quite nicely, have a steep premium because they’re a ‘lifestyle’ product?
Good question. I have no idea! I mean, it looks pretty good. Am I gonna drop 2100 bucks on one? LOL… No. But that’s just me. I’m sure someone will. I have always wondered how those devices sounded. I’d like to try one some day.
I really want to get my head wrapped around this and understand the logic and purpose behind no less than FOUR discrete variants of the same amp. We had the 6XX and the 4XX and now the 99 and soon the CF/
What really goin on here?
PS: How about hot swappable 4xx/6xx/99 and CF modules for 10 bucks a pop as an addon instead?
IMO their pricing is justifiable for the performance that they provide. Of course I don’t know how the ACRO will sound like, but their DAPs have been pretty solid IMO. It’s not for everyone, but it’s justifiable.
Probably they just want to get the most out of the same platform. It’s smart from the business standpoint, but kinda sucks for us seeing the same platform released multiple times.
Yep, it’s more of a marketing play than anything else.
That said, iFi makes good gear, and its rep Sebastien Chiu is very connected to the community (mainly at Head-fi). So, I’m willing to cut iFi some slack on squeezing as many sales out of an existing platform as possible.
Hell, Nike has revived a ton of old shoes from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. It’s just marketing an existing product as new, either through the addition of one feature (iFi) or the passage of time (Nike).
Yeah iFi makes good products, no doubt. I guess it’s fine then. Needless to say, the value on the Zen platform is quite good, no doubt. I mean, any cheaper than this and people would start to think it’s not ‘hi-fi enough’ so, I guess it’s fair.
To be honest tho, I would prefer it if they just make a preamp or tone control device which also has all of their analogue headphone presets. It seems to be a more efficient way of doing it, instead of releasing multiple amps for specific headphones.
Yeah but that EQ you could do yourself too - I think they do something at the hardware level for this platform though, so why it’s a bit of standout from your usual EQing.
@bruh.wav Tone control options as you mentioned would maybe have them make yet another device.
I guess it may be for the lolz as well here what they’re doing, but yeah I guess they squeeze some more life into the Zen Can soon as the older version goes a bit down in popularity. Kind of unique too in a way - no one else is doing that. Like you said, giving it some new clothing every couple of months.
keep dreaming