![Activo P1 DAP](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vNtT5BYoNwu3p2W2MvTrcm-415-80.jpg)
Quick Summary
The Activo P1 is the first digital audio player from Astell & Kern's new and more affordable audio brand. It delivers an impressive specification for an RRP of £399.
If you've been hankering after a hi-res audio player but don't want to pay a premium price tag, Astell & Kern's new Activo brand could be just what you've been waiting for. Its new Activo P1 digital audio player is a hi-res audio player with support for all the key streaming services, it doubles as a wired or wireless DAC, it has 20-hour battery life and it has a price tag of just £399.
The P1 is built around an ESS ES9219Q SABRE Dual-DAC and Astell & Kern's Teraton Alpha amp circuit. There are 3.5mm and balanced headphone outs, 64GB of storage and a microSD slot supporting capacities of up to 1.5TB, and it comes with the Play Store and pre-installed apps including Apple Music, Spotify, Qobuz, TIDAL and more. It supports lossless audio from those apps if you have the appropriate subscriptions.
Activo P1: high spec for a relatively low price
While the price is lower than you'd expect for Astell & Kern hardware there doesn't appear to be any unnecessary corner cutting: Bluetooth is 5.3 with aptX HD and LDAC, charging supports PD 3.0 fast charging and there's full MQA encoding for hi-res audio. You can check out the full specifications on the Activo website.
The design is less striking than a normal Astell & Kern device – it looks more like a smartphone than one of A&K's fascinatingly textured players – and the interface is new: it's light in colour and built around geometric shapes. Physical controls are limited: there are volume controls on one side and power and home buttons on the right. Everything else is done via the 4.1-inch touchscreen.
I've been testing this device for a while now and I'm very impressed by it: while of course the quality will depend very much on what source you're using – for example Spotify's free plan isn't going to excite your ears no matter how good the hardware, and low bitrate MP3s aren't going to sound good on anything – on high quality and on lossless audio the P1 is a very engaging and enjoyable device.
The Activo P1 is available from today from Amazon with an RRP of £399.
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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).
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