After not being happy with my last dap I decided to try the Hiby R3 out, upon opening the box, and emptying every thing out, this is what you receive with it, *I bought mine used* but new ones come with 2 screen screen protection glass for the small display. A Type C to USB A cable, manual, warranty card, Hifi Audio Stickers and a almost clear case for the Hiby R3, I didn't like the clear case.
The first thing I liked about it was the UI was smooth and quick. There was no delay to switching thru the tabs. The added touch of being able to make and use custom Ui theme’s was a nice bonus. It was very easy to applied a theme.
Hiby R3 support connecting to the internet thru the use if 2.4ghz wifi, and Bluetooth for connecting to phones, Bluetooth speakers and media players. Also there is airplay support which is useful for apple devices like an iPhone, for sending music over from the phone to the R3, DLNA is another option, but I haven’t tried it yet. WiFi doesn’t automatic connect you to connections as in if you leave your home WiFi and you go to a secondary location, you manually have to switch to that one and back again if you return home.
Since there is WiFi support there’s also built in Tidal and qubuz which you log in and or switch between the two by holding the tidal icon on the ui to switch to qubuz. The downside is those are the only two streaming options that are supported on the R3 aside from internet radio being supported.
The good thing about airplay being supported is that you can simply use spotify over airplay with your phone and R3, when I tried it I didn’t have any issues with it while at the same time worked really well.
Tidal functionally works but I kinda wish the tidal built in interface was better and even go as far as listed the release date of songs showed in the new album option. Even tho it was limited the function being there was still a plus.
As for the internet radio function I originally didn’t even know it had the support for it, til I saw a thread some where mentioning it. Basically you make a radio.txt file and list the internet stations listening url and then place the text file on the root of your micro SD for it to show up in the custom playlist as radio.
Speaking of the Micro SD even tho I had a lot of songs stored on the 128GB micro SD card I’m using, it didn’t take long to read, There even support up to 2TB micro SD if those even show up to the market. While it does support a large size, there is a limit to how many songs it will read before there start to be issues, around 20k mp3/flac’s I think. I don’t know for sure since I don’t have near that many songs stored.
The display on the R3 is easy to read and is nice and clear, it being touch screen is nice which makes it very easy to move thru the options, without having to use buttons to move thru out the menus. All the buttons felt sturdy, didn’t feel cheaply made and pressing them didn’t have a delay in actions.
The Hiby link app I found was useful when it works, other times it was buggy and cause issues. You have the option to switch tracks/albums using your phone. You can not do the same with tidal while the link app. You can change the volume but I haven’t figured that out yet with the app, as it isn’t as simple as raising or lowering the phone volume it self.
Edited{9/29}
Another useful feature is the Audio dock mode which I was curious about,so i had to wait a bit for my micro USB To Type C cable to come,I tried my Fiio Q1 Mk2 w ith the Hiby R3 in audio dock mode to see if it would work, and yes it does the R3 detect the Q1 mk2 as a audio device and route's audio to it and acts as a decoder.
The down side is if you don't set the usb mode to limited, device such as my Fiio Q1 Mk2 will drain the battery of the hiby R3 to charge it self. Also setting it to limited mode will allow the connected device such as a creative SXFI amp to handle the volume it self, instead of the R3 handing it and sending full 100% to your ears and including resetting it back to 100% if you unplug the SXFI Amp without it on usb limited.
Both my CCA CRA and my ER2se worked very well with the R3, er2se thru the use of the balance connection and the cra on 3.5mm. With my Er2se details came thru clearly and wasn’t too detailed or bright, over all every thing sound good and bass was accurate like normally. With my CRA it still had it hard hitting bass. There were no issues with distorting, pops or any audio issues every thing was perfect.
I gave the line out functionally on the R3 a try with my Fiio Q1 MK2 line in, with it connected to the R3 in line out mode and it worked without issues and I tried the same thing but with my desktop headphone amp the schiit Magnius and there were no issues there either.
3.5mm being a combo HP/Line out jack is nice, too bad the same can’t be said about the 2.5mm bal jack which is a hp out only. The upside is the audio dock function seems to allow you to connect the R3 into a dac thru it's Type C which causes the R3 to act like a source as it routes the audio into another device.
The Audio mode function turns it into a dac/amp which works driver-less with PC, it worked very well in games and I didn’t have issues with media playback software. But there was a slight delay when watching you tube videos, felt like a 1-2 second delay give or take. But it only happened with you tube video’s and not twitch’s videos.
Over all I’m happy with the Hiby R3, best device I ever used for portable music.
