Astell&Kern KANN Alpha

Looking to drive a challenging pair of headphones with a portable player? Ed Selley thinks the chunky KANN Alpha might be what you need

- Ed Selley

AV INFO

PRODUCT: Portable, balanced hi-res music player

POSITION: Middle model in the three-strong KANN series

PEERS: Astell&Kern KANN Cube; FiiO M11 Plus

THE DEDICATED PORTABLE audio player market is not a massive one, and Korean brand Astell&Kern is the biggest fish in a relatively small pond. Its KANN series of players overlaps the more conventional A&Norma and A&Futura ranges, and is designed to be able to drive even very demanding headphones from a smallscale device.

This means the KANN Alpha (£1,100) can pump out 6V from its unbalanced 3.5mm connection, and no less than 12V from its two balanced outputs – one a 2.5mm connection historically preferred by Astell&Kern, the other the newer 4.4mm type. If you don’t want to use a cable at all, Bluetooth 5.0, supporting aptX and LDAC, is integrated.

The KANN Alpha's internal circuitry is fully balanced, facilitated by a pair of ESS Sabre DACs running in dual mono. PCM sampling rate is 32-bit/384kHz and format handling is extensive, extending from lossy MP3 to DSD256 and MQA. If you want to store a lot of large music files, however, you will have to spring for a microSD card as the internal memory is a rather paltry 64GB. Cards of up to 1TB are supported.