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

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.