Grover Neville

Typically I try to avoid reviewing particularly similar products so close together, however in this case I’m making an exception because I think the opportunity for a comparison of sorts is too good to pass up.

Astell & Kern’s T9iE recently passed across my review desk, and in the process of reviewing those IEMs, A&K also reached out to me asking if I’d like to review their then-recently released flagship DAP the SP2000. ‘Why not!’ was my enthusiastic response.

Last time we covered the DAC portion of a good streaming setup, with special attention paid to connectivity and latency, which can make all the difference in audio and video being synched... or not. This time we’ll discuss an often overlooked, but equally vital component for the content-creation and online gaming crowd: the microphone input.

I’ve known of Astell and Kern for a while, in fact they were an early presence over nine years ago at one of the first head-fi meet ups I attended, the summer before my second year of high school.