New brand, old name – Activo is Astell&Kern's new sub brand for lower-tier product. The first is the P1 digital audio player [$430]. Its housing combines aluminium and white polycarbonate, its DAC drives ESS9219Q silicon, its gain stage the Teraton Alpha LSIC. 4.1" 720×1'280 display and streaming housekeeping chores are handled by an octa-core processor. Data support is PCM 384 and DSD 256. Selectable upsampling resamples to the highest rate. A 20-band EQ supports custom tunings, crossfeed emulates speaker listening. Fast charging claims a full charge in 1½ hours whilst playtime is given as 20 hours. USB-C connects to a PC/MAC for external DAC duty. Headphone ports are 3.5mm and 4.4mm. WiFi and Bluetooth 5.3 support cloud access. Built-in memory is 64GB, a microSD slot can hold up to 1.5TB. There's support for MQA and Roon Ready. Weight is just 155g.
