Only thing stopping me from getting i5 is lack of gapless. It's frustrating that Cayin and others just don't get it, particularly when ipods have been doing it natively for years. I'm starting to lose track of how many players I've rejected due to gapless.
Nice. I've neglected setting up a NAS for a long time, and getting the Cayin would be a perfect excuse to set one up!
I'm kinda hesitant as well. Seems like any DAP geared towards audiophiles should have gapless implemented from the start. Especially when players half its price have it. Hopefully they'll listen to our feedback here.
There is the setting for gapless though
It does seem to work well in my case though I don't have much tracks that need gapless.
i5 has Gapless from the very beginning, but it doesn't work flawlessly, if you were listen to some classical album, you can notice a momentarily pause during track changing, this can be disturbing as changing movement in a classical piece should be seamless and Cayin i5 didn't meet that requirement yet.
We do aware of the gapless requirements and our previous DAP, N5 and N6 has implemented that satisfactory, so to certain extend I agree that there are cheaper DAP that can do this right, our N5 is an example of that. Unfortunately our previous effort in Gapless implementation cannot transfer to i5 directly because of the Android platform, which is not the best system for hard-core audio requirements.
I think the case has been mislead. Cayin has listened to user feedback sincerely and we have responded publicly that Gapless refinement is in our to-do list. The disagreement was on the priority of the feature. The player was launched at mid-July at Singapore (the first International market for i5), and we haven been working on urgent bugs and promised features (such as USB-Audio support) in past few weeks, We have to put all the refinement requirements to a lower priority.
It is easy enough to say we are working on it right now and find another excuse to delay at next firmware release. On the other hands, Cayin wants to be as transparent and honest as possible, we advice potential customers who consider Gapless as top-priority to either WAIT until we have new announcement on this feature, or audition the unit before you jump on board. For customers who had bought our i5 already and is looking forwards to an improved Gapless, please be patient and be assured that we have put this into the to-do list, and will come back to this features later. I hope this will clarify our thoughts and position on the Gapless issue.