This Hi-Res Audio player keeps the quality but drops the price tag

Astell & Kern's new Activo brand delivers serious specs for more affordable prices

Activo P1 DAP
(Image credit: Astell & Kern)
Carrie Marshall
By
published
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.

Carrie Marshall
Carrie Marshall

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).

Latest