Between the completion of my Focal Arche listening, and the arrival of the Bifrost 2 and Jotunheim R, most of my listening time has been taken up with the A&K SP2000.
I’d started off with full-sized headphones, where the SP2000 shows a clear advantage over the SP1000M. There’s just more power, and 50% more voltage swing, available with the SP2000, making for a better pairing with higher-impedance headphones.
The interim-two-days I’ve spent focused on this have been mostly with IEMs, and in balanced mode. And that has been very impressive, if not necessarily a big departure from the SP1000M.
I have yet to hear any hiss out of the SP2000 with any of the IEMs I have around here. The background is utterly black, and with every transducer I’ve tried it with, it is completely silent. Not that this is necessarily uncommon with A&K players … but it is an issue with more DAPs than not, so it’s worth calling out.
The CA Andromeda, which is unusually fussy about the output impedance of its source, behaves beautifully here (okay, so they still don’t fit my ears at all but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate what they can do). This is probably the best I’ve heard them from a portable source.
This is the third player that gives my now-departed Sony WM1Z a proper run for it’s money. The SP1000M was the first DAP I’d heard that I felt was genuinely at the same level (while also being useable for me). The Cayin N8 killed my need for the WM1Z (though I do miss the Sony’s battery life sometimes). And now there’s the SP2000.
Proper SP2000/N8 comparisons will be needed. Though I enjoy the N8’s tube-mode so much that no matter what transpires there, the N8 isn’t going anywhere.
I do wish the SP2000 had an actual line-out. I’d love to see (or hear, I guess) how those dual AKM4499 DACs do without the amplifier in the chain.
I was surprised about how much more convincing the stage and portrayal of venue was here vs. the SP1000M. It is more expansive, reverberations/reflections/echoes are more apparent, and it feels more palpable with the new flagship.
Tone is indiscernibly different from my SP1000M (which is an aluminum model, vs. this copper unit). I don’t really buy that the different metals used in these players have an audible effect. At the upper extremes (50% beyond the accepted limits of human hearing) there are some minor measured differences, but proper blind testing with the SS, Cu and Aluminum versions of the A&K 380 series showed no audible difference - at least for me, and I doubt it’s different here.
So, I would (and did) buy the version I liked the look of the most … in this case the copper … and not worry about it.
Proper, sound-specific, impressions are the next stop …
*Not the final shipping unit, but a “production qualifier”, which absent problems is what will go to production.