You have the iPod, the Walkman and plenty of other MP3 players out there ,but what if you want something built for high-end audio that is handled by audiophiles?
For that, you might want to turn to something new coming out of Acoustic Research, with the engineers building a media player designed with a headphone amplifier found directly inside the unit.
The model is called the “ARM2”, and it features a 5 inch touchscreen and enough system specs to run a version of Android with a media player that can touch FLAC, ALAC, APE, DSD, and DXD, which pretty much caters to all of the high resolution media formats you can find out there.
A flagship Burr-Brown digital to analogue (DAC) converter is found in the unit too, while 64GB of storage is provided for the music and a microSDXC slot in case you need to expand on this even more.
Pricing on the unit isn’t cheap, however, with the Acoustic Research ARM2 landing in select specialist stores for $1999, and it arrives at the same time as a DAC without the Android player built directly inside.
If you don’t need a media player and only want the headphone amp with DAC, you’ll find that in the ARUA1, running support for high resolution audio conversion and playback over USB 2.0 with gold plated brass output connector and support for Mac and Windows PCs.
Acoustic Research’s ARUA1 manages to shave a good thousand dollars from the cost of the media player, too, which should be ideal if money is a genuine concern, though if it is, you probably don’t have to go as high grade as Acoustic Research.
Both should be in specialist stores now, however, which should make audiophiles tiring of MP3s quite happy, if not a little annoyed that they’re about to spend more money than they might have expected.
