The Biggest Name in Portable Hi-Fi Just Launched Its Cheapest Player Yet

The P1 by Astell & Kern is the company’s most affordable portable hi-fi player. It’s significantly cheaper than an iPhone.

By Tucker Bowe

Published July 30, 2024

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Updated July 30, 2024

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Astell & Kern is one of the biggest names in portable hi-fi, best known for its gorgeous yet expensive lines of digital audio players (or DAPs) that let audiophiles listen to true lossless audio on the go.

To date, owning an Astell & Kern digital audio player has been a fairly pricey endeavor. The company’s most affordable option has been the SR35 ($799), which is considerably cheaper than its flagship player, the A&Ultima SP3000 ($3,600), but still just as expensive as an iPhone 15.

Basically, if you were looking for an entry-level portable hi-fi player that was also reasonably affordable, you weren’t going to Astell & Kern. You were looking at entry-level options from the likes of FiiO, Sony and Hidizs, instead. Well, that’s now changing.

The P1 by Astell & Kern is the company’s most affordable portable hi-fi player ever. It sacrifices some design elements of A&K’s higher-end players, but it’s also super versatile and includes some modern conveniences as well.

Meet the P1 by Astell & Kern

P1 by Astell & Kern

Specs

DAC	Dual ESS ES9219Q Sabre DACs
Audio Quality	PCM up to 32-bit/384kHz, DSD256
Battery	Up to 20 hours of playback

$430 at Astell & Kern

The P1 by Astell & Kern has almost everything you’d want (and then some) in an entry-level portable hi-fi player. It features dual ESS ES9219Q Sabre DACs, a powerful headphone amplifier, a 20-band equalizer, gain control and 3.5mm (unbalanced) and 4.4mm (balanced) jacks. It supports lossless audio up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM and DSD256, as well.

Like Astell & Kern’s other portable hi-fi players, the P1 runs an Android operating system. It’s unique, however, because it also supports the Google Play Store. This makes it easy to install your favorite music streaming app — such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, Qobuz and Tidal — and then download high-res audio tracks for offline listening. No side-loading apps required.

For those with extensive music libraries — maybe you’ve bought a lot of lossless tracks, digitized your vinyl, or ripped your CD collection — the P1 can store that, too. It comes with 64GB of storage, but you can expand that to 1.5TB with a microSD card.

Interestingly, Astell & Kern’s P1 supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth streaming. This means when at home and connected to Wi-Fi, assuming you have wired headphones or IEMs, you can listen to audio from any music streaming service at its maximum resolution.

You can also pair your wireless headphones or earbuds to the P1, although there will be an obvious drop-off in audio quality. The P1 does feature Bluetooth 5.3 with support for aptX HD and LDAC so you can stream higher-resolution audio if you have wireless headphones that also support those codecs.

(Note: none of Apple’s AirPods support aptX HD or LDAC.)

Another neat thing with the P1 is that you can hook it up to your laptop, desktop or smartphone via USB-C and it’ll function as an external DAC/headphone amp. So it can up the audio quality of your other devices as well.

As far as the hardware, the P1 has a 4.1-inch touchscreen display and an aluminum and polycarbonate body. It lacks the angular design and brushed aluminum shell of Astell & Kern’s more expensive audio players. But it’s smaller, lighter and easier to fit into a pocket.

Additionally, the three side buttons for playback controls are textured, so you can play/pause or skip tracks without having to take the P1 out of your pocket.

Price and availability

The P1 by Astell & Kern looks to be a prime entry-level portable hi-fi player for anybody with an extensive library of lossless tracks who also still wants to stream audio tracks from Apple Music, Spotify or Tidal.

At $430, the P1 still isn’t cheap — despite being Astell & Kern’s most affordable portable hi-fi player. You’re paying a slight premium for its versatility and, let’s face it, its iPod-esque design.

The P1 by Astell & Kern will be available next month — in August 2024. You’ll be able to order it from Amazon and most other online retailers.