When it comes to portable listening and not just casual portable listening but true-fidelity portable listening, there is only one player around and this is the Altmann Tera.

Wanted, conceptualized, designed and built by Charles Altmann (hey, that's me;) in Germany.

From the Tera-creator's standpoint, first comes the Tera, then many thousands of miles desert and nothingness, then some more or less expensive boutique players of questionable origin, shortly followed by shipwrecks of junk including all smart-phones and mp3-players regardless of make. /rant-mode off ;-)

The Tera-Player combines a set of highly desirable qualities that cannot be found in any other music-player in its perfection of combination:

1) natural sound quality. All the details of the recording but everything sounds natural. Voices, violins, drums. You can hear the materials of the instruments, the stage, about everything.

2) ruggedness. Massive aluminum front plates and housing, ruggedized output jacks and charging connector.

3) small and lightweight yet great battery life. Half a cigarrette pack, 80 gram, 12..15 hours playtime

4) superior navigation. Tera's navigation using 5 large buttons yield effortless access to tracks, albums and artists, just as you love to find in your favourite record-shop.

For the record,, here's mine: Maikäfer - Adelhauser Str. - Freiburg - Germany.

Inside famous Maikäfer shop, front area CDs, rear area vinyl and vintage hifi-equipment.

Below cards with artist names. In order to go to the next artist, press center-up button. Previous artist center-down buttons.

To access the next record within shop (Tera's storage card) press center -right. Previous record center-left buttons.

Next track within an album press right, previous track left button. I don't think it cannot get any easier!

Tera-Player also has a unique random play feature: Pressing down-right buttons activate random-play without interrupting the current playback! Pressing left-button exits random mode, but also without interrupting current playback.

However any and all of these great features would be nothing, if there wasn't this sound quality that you cannot find elsewhere. It is not possible to describe or define sound quality in a text. Only hints can be given and even the most beautiful words and sophisticated descriptions are now used all over the place, so there's no benefit in trying.

I'll try anyway, so here's my description:

I am a very happy person, spending many hours each day listening to music in my laboratory, while working on .. stuff. This has been going on for more than 20 years or so. Over the time I designed and invented all those sound devices you find on this (and other) websites and my intention was always to identify and eliminate distortions, because it is those distortions that become tiring with time and thus keep you from really listening. Since the time I had designed the BYOB amp, the Attraction DAC and my speaker system I have reached a state of complete satisfaction. There is nothing that I would like to change in my system or products. They are as perfect as it goes and it took me more than 10 years to find out how good they really are and there seems no end to it.

There only was one tiny problem: Sometimes you have to leave the laboratory (house) and you cannot take the sound with you. Historically I had used a portable cassette player (walkman) and that was quite okay, but not really timely anymore. Portable CD-players (discmen) were too bulky. I tried ipods, mp3-players, smartphones and their sound gave me a good headache. A tiny problem became a Big problem. I realized that all those companies, small or big, that were building portable music players had absolutely no idea about sound quality and it seemed that the people who were buying these products and actually liking them seemed to be existing at a very low level of listening awareness. So there was no hope at all that this would ever change. The only solution to the problem was that I'd put all my experience together in order to create from scratch the worlds only true-fidelity portable music player. That's what I did and this is the Tera-Player.

It fills me with pride and makes me immensely happy that today the Tera-Player is in the hands of true music-lovers all over the world.

I am complete and blissed out.

Additional info available on www.tera-player.com