Swiping up from the bottom shows a song’s details. It will bring you back to the currently playing song if you are browsing or, when a song is playing, show the other tracks on the album. Swiping down from the top provides quick access to oft-used system-specific settings, such as wireless, brightness, and USB settings. Swiping from the left side of the screen brings out the Activo’s main menu. It adopts the outstanding user interface found in Astell&Kern’s expensive high-res digital audio players, with some nuanced, graphical refinements. Whether you’re a novice or a pro, you’ll find the Activo to be a joy to use. Then again, these are features the average consumer will never miss. There’s no 2.5mm balanced output, for example, nor is there a S/PDIF digital or line-level analog output. The Activo does omit some features found on higher-end players.
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The Activo CT10 comes with a free, easy-to-use DLNA-compliant streaming server for Mac and Windows computers. Once I’d done that with the CT10, I had wireless access to more than 21,000 music tracks on my computer.
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It’s easy to use, too: Install the software, follow the prompts, and forget about it. You’ll need a Tidal HiFi membership, $19.99 per month, to access the thousands of MQA-encoded albums available with that service. Tidal is now serving up high-res MQA streams, typically at 24-bit/96kHz. MQA, short for Master Quality Authenticated, is an audio codec that applies a digital fingerprint to a file to guarantee it was sourced from the original master recording. The aptX HD codec is backward compatible with headphones supporting the regular aptX codec, which delivers near-CD-quality audio. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s capable of streaming high-res music wirelessly. AptX HD allows playback of LPCM data with up to 24-bit resolution and sampling rates as high as 48kHz over Bluetooth, provided you pair it with wireless headphones that also support aptX HD. Upping the high-res ante, the CT10 is among the few budget players to support aptX HD and MQA. Things get even better with the Activo’s strong network support, which I’ll talk about more below.
That’s not too shabby, although the prices for a 400GB microSD cards start at about $160 on Amazon. Thankfully, the CT10 comes with a microSD slot capable of supporting up to 400GB microSD cards, giving this player maximum storage capacity of 416GB. If you’re thinking that’s too little storage for lots of high-res files, you’re be right. High-resolution lossless files can take up a lot of storage space, and the CT10 comes with a modest 16GB of onboard storage. It’s easy to browse the onboard storage as well as the contents of a mounted microSD card slot.
Most people can easily hear the difference between lossy and lossless encording of the same music.
Lossy file formats discard some data to make smaller files, but you’ll never get that data back. The Activo will also play lossy formats, such as MP3, AAC, and WMA.