This v2.0 firmware upgarde has concluded our complete series of announcement. Cayin has announced Hi-Res Audio endorsement, Universal USB Audio Driver, CS-30TCR Type C to RCA Coaxial cable and the i5 USB DAC in v2.0 firmware upgrade within 24 hours and i5 is definitely the center of all four announcements.
Our i5 firmware upgrade process has not been a satisfactory experience to users, to remedial the situation, we have setup a new web server in Hong Kong to host our English website, and if you were to upgrade your i5 firmware manually, you will download the firmware package from Hong Kong, this will be a more stable connection to almost everyone here. When I test the new website, I can download an i5 firmware in around 5 minutes, that's our full speed for 1 user, which mean if you have 5 users downloading firmware at the same time, it will take 25/30 minutes to complete the download, not a very excited figures but at least the download will stay connected and you'll not dropped out prematurely, this is something that we desperately wanted to get it right.
Although we have improved our download service, we still keep the Google Drive mirror link just in case, so if you have run into any trouble with our download service, please use the mirror download link instead.
We have also started the OTA upgrade service, we'll push the firmware upgrade notice to all international i5 users in 5 batches. So theoretically it will take 5 days to complete the OTA upgrade roll-out. Unfortunately we cannot migrate our OTA service to Hong Kong server in this round, so if you were to upgrade your i5 via OTA, you'll still go through our server in Mainland China. We should be able to move the OTA service to HK in next firmware upgrade.
Regarding the USB DAC firmware, we have are satisfied by the final product, and I hope you'll be happy with it too. We are still working on it, trying to improve the stability of the system. For instance, we are aware of the following bug:
At v2.0 firmware, set i5 DAC mode to DAC, play music, turn off machine, connect to PC with USB cable and power on again. Under this "unlikely" steps, i5 will go into DAC mode when power up, the screen will display DAC mode interface, but there is no output from both PO and LO, even when you disconnect the USB cable, the DAC interface will remain on the screen. We don't think this will be a serious threat to the i5 USB DAC function, so we decided to roll out the v2.0 firmware as-is and leave these optimization to next round of firmware.
Last but not least, the USB Digital Audio OUT function (i.e., using i5 as a digital transport and connect to external DAC via USB) is pending, we should be able to deliver this feature in next firmware upgrade.
I can now go back to organize the i5 World Tour, hopefully the tour will bring in more reviewer to this discussion thread, and provide more opinion and impression to the i5 community. I am very excited about this an is looking forward to the reviews/impression in next 2 months, so everyone please stay tune for that.