Astell&Kern A&Ultima SP2000 Portable High Resolution Music Player, Copper

Excellent sound, very comfortable user interface but a little heavy and bulky, I have to hold it carefully every time or it will fall.

Has started to randomly hang up. Won't ever spend this amount of money on a day ever again. I learned my lesson.

I liked the heaviness of the DAP. I like the visual appearance of the DAP. I love music. I'm the type that goes from the car, to earbuds, to the BT speakers in the house. So I bought this to match up with the MB sound system, but found myself reconnecting my cellphone. Why? Easy access to the files. You have to download "services" such as Tidal. I read about the lack of response time, but didn't think it was THAT BAD. The screen response can be very slow and if it wasn't, I would've kept the $4k mp3 player.PROS: Solid and appealing. Great sound of course (if you have speakers to match).CONS: Overly expensive. Slow screen response. The device holds oxidized fingerprints a lot.Had to return the device for now.

This exquisite paperweight looks beautiful and sounds amazing... when it works. I imported 20k tracks from my iPod onto it, all of which worked flawlessly on that player. On the SP2000, however, the first tenth of a second and the last half a second of each track does not play. Now, perhaps that doesn't bother you. Consider, then, that it took (literally) 24 hours to load those 20k files onto the player! Finally, tonight it decided to only play the instrumental parts of songs and mute the vocals. I've decided I'm just going to memorize my favorite songs and hum them to myself.

Wow, $3000 for an mp3 player. I don't think ANY mp3 player justifies this price.