ICON

ASTELL&KERN A&ULTIMA SP3000 GOLD

£4399 / astellnkern.co.uk

Nice. How many carrots is that?

What’s it to you, Bugs? Try taking a bite out of the SP3000 and you’ll need to visit a dentist, not a greengrocer. And while the carats you’re thinking of do indeed come from the ground, you’ll be very lucky to find any by digging around in your allotment or wandering down the veg aisle of your local Aldi: Astell&Kern has slathered this limited-edition digital music player in 24K gold plates. That might not be one of the hardest metals on the periodic table, but we still wouldn’t advise putting it in your coleslaw.

What would you suggest instead?

Cabbagesium is probably best, mixed with a generous dollop of mayoganese. The gold plating is certainly the most eye-catching thing about this SP3000, but beneath it you get the kind of components befitting palm-sized high-end hi-fi, so it’s much more than just a glittering show-off. It uses an Asahi Kasei AK4499EX DAC chip, with separate circuits for the balanced and unbalanced outputs to keep the sonic signals as pure as possible. There are three different headphone sockets on the top – 2.5mm, 3.5mm and 4.4mm –plus Bluetooth 5 in case you want to go wireless.

Surely that’s sacrilege?

Wired will almost certainly always take the gold medal when it comes to outright sound quality, but there is support for aptX HD and LDAC, so some of the more audiophile-friendly wireless cans will still sound pretty sweet. If you insist on the best you’ll want to feed it 32-bit/768kHz PCM or DSD512 files, which you can do either from your home network over Wi-Fi or by loading up its 256GB of onboard storage. Need more room for those Spandau classics? It takes microSD cards up to 1TB, with a 5.46in Full HD touchscreen and a watch-style crown for controlling it all. Golden.

THERE ARE THREE HEADPHONE SOCKETS ON THE TOP, PLUS BLUETOOTH 5

Reelin’ in the ears

If you do anything for over 60 years you tend to get pretty good at it, which is why we