First of all, I would like to clarify that Cayin has not ceased the firmware development work of i5 DAP. We are still working on several problems/improvements but these issues are related to low level programming. HiBy has tested their code on other platforms and the problems (such as gapless and sorting of alphanumeric list) do not show up at all. We believe the issues are chipset related and we have been waiting for patches from the solution provider of Leadcore since then. We were most disappointed when we were told that Leadcore will not provide further support to LC1813 (i5 CPU) on portable audio applications, they shall focused on other chipset and application area. Cayin is working with HiBy Music to resolve the problems by building codes to wrap around the current SoC kernel but the progress is indeed very slow. We have deployed some of the team members to other projects while we were waiting, now that we know we are on our own, we shall beef up the Android solution team again and speed things up a bit.
There were comment that Cayin, or Andy Kong in specific, has avoided the i5 thread. Before you come to this conclusion, I invite you to check out the status of other Cayin product threads as well. For the record, we have maintained the same level of priority on our online presence and support on i5, N5, N6, C5, iDAC-6, iHA-6 and HA-1aMk2.
We have continued to monitor the discussion on all these Cayin threads, collecting problems and conduct testing and evaluation whenever necessary. Please be rest assured that Cayin is not in-active while we are “silenced”, we just believed that we shouldn’t jump on board with empty promises only.
We have noticed some users prefer v2.0 firmware and consider that is more stable than the v2.2 firmware, and asked for option to rollback to v2.0. We take these comments seriously and have conducted a small scale reliability test on this subject. We have repackaged v2.0 firmware into v2.3Beta and asked several staff/users to “upgrade” their i5 to v2.3Beta. However, the test result is non-conclusive (i.e., there is different opinion and “V2.3Beta is more reliable than v2.2” is not the majority opinion), and we suspect the issue might be a combination of Firmware + File Format + Usage, so some users preferred v2.3Beta in our test, but some preferred the extra features in v2.2.
Despite the result is non-conclusive, we would like to entertain our customer’s request whenever possible. We can provide v2.3Beta firmware to users who would desperately want to roll back to v2.0. We have evaluated the situation and decided not to release v2.3Beta as an official firmware update (in view of the non-conclusive result), so this firmware will not be available in our official website nor through OTA. Users can download the v2.3Beta and install the firmware manually. Installation of v2.3Beta will not affect your warranty.
Please be reminded that this is an one-time special arrangement, once you “upgraded” to v2.3Beta (which is a re-numbered v2.0 firmware), you cannot roll back to V2.2 again, so please think twice before you go for this. If no one is objecting to this proposal, I’ll upload the v2.3Beta to Google Drive and release the link later today or tomorrow.
Cayin is indifferent to other brands on our marketing campaign; we have been extremely busy in attending numerous shows and events in past few months. I have represented Cayin in three CanJam: NYC in Feb, Singapore in March, and SoCal in April. I had a short trip to Taiwan in May, and I’ll be attending Los Angeles Audio Show in LA next week. So managing all these shows and events have taken up a lot of my times and resource, I have to slow down on my participation on HeadFi forum inevitably. I allocated my limited resource to support N3 product thread at a higher priority in past two months, I assume that is understandable because N3 was newly launched on late March only.
I hope we have clarified our status and explained our short-term absence on the forum. I apology for all inconvenient and disappointment caused while we were occupied. Hopefully our shows and event schedule will slow down slightly in second half of 2017 and we can get back on track immediately.