Astell & Kern KANN Alpha in Urbanely Blue

It is the third in the Astell & Kern KANN Series, the Astell & Kern KANN Alpha, which is now available in a new version. Until now, this DAP was offered in Onyx Black, but now it is available in Urbanely Blue.

The Astell & Kern KANN Alpha represents a particularly exciting offer in the broad product range of so-called digital audio players, also known as DAPs, from the specialist Astell & Kern.

The brand of the company iRiver Ltd. offers the third hi-res audio player of the Astell & Kern KANN Series and wants to offer all the strengths that distinguish this product line in the most modern way.

Fully symmetrical construction

First and foremost, the fully balanced construction stands out, which is supposed to provide outstanding key data and thus ultimately a particularly excellent sound quality. The heart of the signal processing is a completely newly designed circuit, which is also supposed to offer a high output power for the best possible control of different headphones.

To ensure that this flexibility is not compromised by the available interfaces, the Astell & Kern KANN Alpha for the first time features not only a 3.5 mm stereo mini-jack for unbalanced headphones, but also a 2.5 mm jack and a 4.4 mm jack for balanced headphones.

High performance, impeccable features

Performance is provided by a quad-core CPU, which is supported by 64 GB of NAND memory. For audio data, a microSD card slot is available for storage media with a capacity of up to 1 TByte.

The signal processing of the Astell & Kern KANN ALPHA is carried out by means of high-quality D/A converters of the type ESS ES9068AS in a so-called Dual DAC configuration. This allows data in Linear PCM format with up to 32 bits and 384 kHz, as well as data in DSD with up to DSD256 to be processed natively.

The central control element is a 4-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 720 x 1,280 pixels, and there is a rotary encoder on the side. The rotary encoder has LED illumination, which uses different colours to provide information about the type of audio data being played and its resolution.

In addition to WiFi according to IEEE 802.11n, the Astell & Kern KANN Alpha offers Bluetooth 5.0 and a USB-C interface.

The 5,600 mAh 3.8 V lithium polymer battery guarantees a particularly long battery life of up to 14.5 hours.

New Design Variant – Astell & Kern KANN Alpha in Urbanely Blue

Up to now, the Astell & Kern KANN Alpha was offered in the Onyx Black version, but now a new, very elegant variant has been added. From now on, you can also choose the new Urbanely Blue version of the Astell & Kern KANN Alpha.

The new Astell & Kern KANN Alpha in Urbanely Blue is to be available in specialist shops as of now, as the distributor Audio Tuning Vertriebs GmbH informed us.

The recommended retail price for the Astell & Kern KANN Alpha in Urbanely Blue is stated at € 1,199.

Getting to the point

The Astell & Kern KANN Alpha has been an extremely interesting solution for all those who want to call a powerful, flexible DAP their own. Now, Astell & Kern is freshening up the design of the DAP a little and presenting the new Astell & Kern KANN Alpha in Urbanely Blue in addition to the previously available version in Onyx Black.