Which high-resolution digital audio player can stand out from numerous DAPs?

Video playback media, such as television, have had a great development in scale and technology in the past decade, while audio is on the contrary, which has even experienced a certain decline. When it comes to audio, most people would rather sacrifice fidelity to pursue convenience and portability, leading manufacturers to adopt the MP3 format as our benchmark for listening to music. However, this shoddy lossy audio format robs the music of its original vitality and detail. The good news is that this doesn't have to be the case anymore—high-resolution DAPs will be a boon for music lovers.

What is different from traditional audio playback media is that high-resolution DAPs is designed for high-quality audio. It uses a series of high-performance modules such as high-powered digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and has amplifiers that can drive almost all kinds of high-end earphones. Of course, in addition to high-quality audio format, DAP can play any type of it, but it is designed to play audio which has better formats and codecs than CD.

Best high-res DAP

Astell&Kern's latest KANN series is a near-perfect audio player. No matter what kind of audio source or headphones, and no matter how hard the source is to drive, it can give you an exciting blast of sound. If you prefer to listen to music with wired headphones, KANN Alpha is your best choice, which offers various sizes of headphone outputs. While if you prefer the convenience of wireless one, it can also support as it comes with the LDAP and APTX HD Codecs.

Second place

It seems to be a contest within Astell & Kern. Compared with Kann alpha, SA700 doesn’t have the 4.4mm balanced headphone output, nor does it support LDAP for wireless playback, but it does almost the same things as KANN Alpha—it drives and plays almost as nice sound as KANN Alpha.