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 (opens in new tab) and Audiovisual Online (opens in new tab). That isn't only 33 per cent less than its original price tag, it is the lowest price it's ever been.
(opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)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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