AQUA+ Headphone Amplifier
The AQUA+ is a portable headphone amplifier with a built-in digital to analog converter (DAC).
Nexum is an engineering team from Taiwan founded in 2013. Their team of designers and audio engineers has successfully used Kickstarter to back the development of a product last year, the AQUA headphone amplifier. This year they're back with a new iteration of their portable amplifier called the AQUA+. The original AQUA received great reviews for improving the mobile music-listening experience, but received some reports of durability issues. The new version of the portable amp has a new focus, and hopes to improve the design and quality of the original.
With the world becoming progressively more mobile, Nexum's gadgets fill a void in the accessory space for those of us craving better audio than what our iPhone/Android phone provides digitally. The AQUA+ has a built-in DAC to convert the digital signal to analog. While 24 bit audio is typically considered high resolution, the AQUA+ takes this a step further by increasing the sample conversion rate to 32 bit audio.
In converting our audio listening experiences to pure digital audio, we lose some of the quality in a conversion process of taking sound waves and translating them to bits and bytes. While the AQUA+ won't reproduce a completely analog experience that you might get with a vinyl setup, it provides a much needed enhancement to the audio listening experience when using our smartphones as the source of music. To begin your upgraded listening experience you will pair your phone to the device (using Bluetooth) and plug in your headphone cable.
The device is currently available for preorder in three different colors: white, gold and black. On a full charge you can listen to 32 bit audio for 5.5 hours. Included in the package is also a wireless charger for charging the device for maximum convenience. Backers of the project are estimated to start receiving deliveries in November of 2017, which is just around the corner.
