[Andykong]

I'm also having the Play/Pause small delay. I'll add for developers that this 1-2 sec delay happens no matter whether i use the physical Play/Pause button or the Touch Screen.
I'll add that this small delay also happens when changing the equalizer. And these delays are a bit annoying, making the unit not looking very responsive, which is kinda disappointing for such a quite-high-end device IMHO, especially considering the more than 500 € price (i have the N5iiS btw).

Regarding the Bluetooth, i also had disconnects, but for me, it seems to happen when the Cayin being at more than 2 meters distance from my ONKYO A/V Receiver. I'd really like to hear from Cayin what is the max distance for BT transmission as 2 meters definitely looks poor to me. And i couldn't find that information on Cayin's site nor in the manual.

I haven't been using the DAC mode so far so i cannot confirm your issues on this part.

Been playing with the beast since a few days now, I'm adding several remarks to yours while i'm here...

- I'm also a bit puzzled with the automatic-off options :

1° i don't really get why there are 2 'Scheduled Power Off' options, one in the main Cayin app settings, and the other one in the global Android settings. These 2 options doesn't look related as settings seems independent. So these settings looks redundant and i also suspect they might interfer together, although i haven't much investigate in playing with both so far. Or maybe i missed something ?

2° the 'Sleep Time' and 'Scheduled Power Off' in the main Cayin app settings seems to have bad english. Text says : 'Will be 0 stop playing after xx minutes' (and you can adjust the 0 value).
But if i'm not mistaken, it should rather say 'Will stop playing after 0 minutes' (there's no reason to me for letting a fixed 'xx minutes' text). And the same goes for the 'Sleep Time' text option

3° i don't understand the point of the 'Sleep Time' function by the way as it just seems to stop playing after a certain time. From my perspective, a sleep mode should power off the unit, but this is already the purpose of the 'Scheduled Power off' function. So i don't see the use of this automatic stop playing function, but maybe that's just me and some other people might find this function useful.

- i regret that you always have to go back to the home page in order to update the custom equalizer. Double tap or long pressing the icon could eg display the cutom equalizer setting window, this would let user adjust the equalizer a lot more faster IMHO. I also find that setting individual bands isn't that easy as finger are unfortunately not accurate and it's hard to see the sliders while you're moving them. But i must admit i have no idea how this could be improved apart from allowing using the physical buttons for adjusting the equa while its window is opened, but i'm not sure this could be easily implemented. I would also have appreciate to have at least 2 custom equalizers.

- the same issue of unaccurate slider through touch screen goes with the track time player slider. no matter which player theme is used, reaching near the end of the track with the slider is always very hard and you instead easily jumps to the next track.

- i wish there was some accelerate playing sound of the song when fast forward and rewind, helping me to hear what happens. And i would also have prefer a progressive acceleration (slow on start pressing, then faster after a while), instead of the constant speed which is quite very fast right from the start to me.

- i also wish there was a way to display the remaining time (you could eg switch between remaining and total time displayed by tapping on total time)

- i miss a queue playing mode. i had this on previous mp3 player i had in the past and it was definitely handy for improvising dance night sessions

- i regret that the cover art constantly re-drawing while scrolling. it makes the unit look almost buggy and such lag seems rather disappointing for, again, such a high-end unit in 2018.

- i wish the screen saver screen should display more info on the current track playing as although it's rather beautiful, i don't really see the use of that animated song-note-icon using quite half the screen.

- playlists created through the unit are sorted in created date order. I wish there would be a setting for choosing to also sort them alphabetically if user want to.

Now i also want to add some good points. The sound is rather outstanding to me and i overall like my beast so far. It looks is also great and beautiful, and the screen quality is also very good.
I like the volume wheel, plus also that you can adjust the volume with swiping up/down on the center of the touch screen after turning the wheel (which is faster than tapping the +/- icons). I found this by myself as i don't think it's actually mentionned in the manual. Another thing not mentionned in the manual and that i found by myself is that keeping pressing the play button unload the current track and leads you back to the home page. Quite useful as i always miss a stop button on all of these recent players (yeah i'm a kinda old-school guy ^^)

Ok, i'll end here, forgive me for the quite long report and thanks if you read all
I've been a beta-tester for a long time for another audio brand, this certainly explains all my concerns i've listed so far (and i have not reported everything i was thinking of ^^).

(1) Idle shutdown vs scheduled power off

The Idle Shutdown is a power management feature. For example, if you enabled the idle shutdown feature and set the idle shutdown time to 10 minutes. the system will power off the player when the player remains idle for 10 minutes. This is the typical power-saving mechanism I used on daily basis: when I arrive home, I'll unplug the earphone and wrap it up into a carrying case, and leave player aside in PAUSE condition. The player will enter IDLE condition after a while and then power off after 10 minutes.

The Scheduled power off works like a stop watch, when you activities this feature, the clock start to countdown in regardless of the condition of the player, and power off the player when the designed time is reached, and it will resume to OFF condition when you turn on the player again. It is similar to the old school SLEEP function.

So idle shutdown only works when the player remains in idle condition over a predefined period of time. If you set the idle shutdown timing to 10 minutes and you turn on the screen to check out the name of a song in 9th minutes, the idle shutdown feature will need to wait for another 10 minutes before it kicks in. The Scheduled power off, on the other hand, will not consider the player operation condition, once the countdown is fulfilled, it will turn off the player even when it is in the middle of playback.

(2) EQ adjustment

You can switch between EQ from playback screen, but you are correct that changing the frequency band can only be achieved from the Application Menu. There are three options to access the Application Menu:

1. Swipe from left to right at Home Screen
2. Click the "steering wheel" icon on any file management screen (Music, List, cloud tab)
3. Click the short-cut button to jump from playback screen to Home screen (the down arrow on top left corner, immediately below the volume reading) and wither swipe or click the steering wheel to bring up the Application Menu.

We appreciate your suggestion to speed up the frequency band custom setting page because this will save 1-2 clicks (depends your current location) during EQ related operation. Since the current EQ setting in N5ii has been in place for a year, we don't intend to modify an existing practices unless there is an absolute necessity. Therefore we prefer to keep the UI as-is in N5ii/N5iiS. We'll consider this suggestion seriously in subsequent products

When you adjust the slider of individual band, the adjusted value in dB should be reflected on the EQ parameter list on top of the frequency band. This should provide an accurate information on the level of adjustment while you are using the sliders.

I believe you can adjust the 8 preset EQ (Dace, Pop, Jazz,... etc) to your own preference and he player will save the EQ parameters even after you reboot the player, so you can customize upto 9 EQ curves already. The only problem is you can't change the name of the EQ, these are hardcoded in our UI.

(3) FF and Rewind

I tested the FF control, I can jump to last 20 seconds of a 5 minutes song on the default theme in 4 out of 5 attempts (and jumped to next song in the failed attempt). I am not sure if this is consider "reaching near the end of the track" already. The "accelerated playing sound" you referred to during FF and Rewind is considered unpleasant in our experience, some users will find these noise un-tolerable, so we shall mute the player during FF and rewind. This is unlikely to change even in our subsequent products.

Sorry, I can only response to some of your questions. I'll get back to you when I am in a better shape next week.

 

[Andykong]

GDrive works without any problem.

The problem is that the harmful program alert occurs before the download page (and its links) are displayed. So the download links are not in cause but it rather looks like it's the whole page because if you don't force your browser to display it despite the alert message, you won't be able to see anything on the page.

Hope this helps.

I'm adding here proof that the harmful program alert also occurs when trying to reach the documentation download page :



So it actually seem to occur on any of Cayin's site download pages.

It happend on firmware link click. As simple as that. Before it wasn't an issue.

Thanks, this helped. I'll forward this to our web administrator and urge him to rectify the situation.

 

[carpler]

Installed the last 3.6EN firmware and done a wipe cache and wipe data.
Noticed that also in this update the problem on gapless reproduction with cue sheet file is not solved.
I'm disappointed about this.
Reported this problem many month ago, send to support a cue file and related flac file, but nothing changed.
I've got manu albums stored in a single large flac file and play then with the cue sheet file, but on the N5ii there is a sort of a little skip between tracks and gapless is not working properly.
I think that this is a basic feature for a good player...

 

[acroyear]

Thank you for testing the firmware fior us. We had done a lot of testing before we release the firmware, but field test with large user samples is always the way to go.

You definitely know this problem very well because you alerted us about this issue back in October and we have discussed this in detail. For the benefit of newcomers, this problem was caused by the GCM service, or GCM_CONN_ALARM in Google service specifically. Google Cloud Messaging (commonly referred to as GCM) is a mobile notification service developed by Google that enables third-party application developers to send notification data or information from developer-run servers to applications that target the Google Android Operating System, unfortunately it has been reported that the GCM_CONN_ALARM will trigger a wakelock, stop the Android device from going into sleep or idle and drain the battery. For those who want to find out more from the original discussion, please refer to here.

Originally I intend to explain this problem and alert you and @Slater91 as soon as the new firmware is released, unfortunately I was struck by Influenza since last Thursday so endup I have to let Silvia to conduct the firmware update announcement and followup.

Fixing the idle shutdown was a huge surprise. Thank you very much! Between that, and the better standby power management, the N5iiS has become my dap of choice again over my R6.

 

[originalsnuffy]

Updated. Guess I forgot how relatively difficult it is to update this unit because it uses Android.

 

[thedud3]

(1) Idle shutdown vs scheduled power off

The Idle Shutdown is a power management feature. For example, if you enabled the idle shutdown feature and set the idle shutdown time to 10 minutes. the system will power off the player when the player remains idle for 10 minutes. This is the typical power-saving mechanism I used on daily basis: when I arrive home, I'll unplug the earphone and wrap it up into a carrying case, and leave player aside in PAUSE condition. The player will enter IDLE condition after a while and then power off after 10 minutes.

The Scheduled power off works like a stop watch, when you activities this feature, the clock start to countdown in regardless of the condition of the player, and power off the player when the designed time is reached, and it will resume to OFF condition when you turn on the player again. It is similar to the old school SLEEP function.

So idle shutdown only works when the player remains in idle condition over a predefined period of time. If you set the idle shutdown timing to 10 minutes and you turn on the screen to check out the name of a song in 9th minutes, the idle shutdown feature will need to wait for another 10 minutes before it kicks in. The Scheduled power off, on the other hand, will not consider the player operation condition, once the countdown is fulfilled, it will turn off the player even when it is in the middle of playback.

Thanks for your clarifications. I actually already quite understood the difference between idle vs scheduled power off.
But it think i got confused due to these settings that are available in 2 different places, plus with different naming for the idle one.

See in the main Cayin Root menu, these both settings are named 'Sleep Time' and 'Scheduled Power Off', but in the Android settings, they are named 'Idle Shutdown' and 'Scheduled Power Off' :

So 'Sleep Time' is named 'Idle Shutdown' in Android settings. I might seem picky as the 2 naming means the same thing, but it's again confusing, from my perspective.

Besides, these settings in main Cayin root menu and Android settings are not related. For instance, in my main Cayin root menu, UI says i have a power off time set to 0 although in my Android settings, i did set it to 60 minutes :

Again i really think it's confusing for end-user to have these same settings in different places, with one not having the same name, and without even knowing which one will be effective. I mean, i haven't tested it yet but i wonder what will happen if i set the scheduled power time to 10 minutes in Android settings, and to 30 minutes in Cayin menu. But anyway, again, having same settings in different places, and without being linked together, is definitely not a good thing for a UI IMHO. This is really confusing.

And also, the 'will be 0 shutdown after xx minutes' doesn't look good english to me. It's the minutes which are counted and not the shutdown. So it should rather say 'will be shutdown after 0 minutes' (or whatever minutes value selected through the slider).

We appreciate your suggestion to speed up the frequency band custom setting page because this will save 1-2 clicks (depends your current location) during EQ related operation. Since the current EQ setting in N5ii has been in place for a year, we don't intend to modify an existing practices unless there is an absolute necessity. Therefore we prefer to keep the UI as-is in N5ii/N5iiS

I wasn't thinking of changing the place for the EQ setting but rather of adding a kind of shortcut to it by also showing the pop-up EQ setting window when eg we would keep pressing a while any of the 9 presets icons when we are in player mode (i mean after having pressed the EQ icon which already let user choose a preset). And having the ability to disable the EQ from this same screen would also be very handy as it would again prevent from having to add several click before reaching this setting. See like this :

Ok, i though agree it's way easier to do it in an image than in code lines...

The "accelerated playing sound" you referred to during FF and Rewind is considered unpleasant in our experience, some users will find these noise un-tolerable, so we shall mute the player during FF and rewind. This is unlikely to change even in our subsequent products.

As you stated "some users will find these noise un-tolerable". And i'm not one of those I fully agree with you that it might sound un-pleasant to some users though. So the best compromise for satisfying as many people as possible IMO is to have this setting being available through a custom user option.

And please, do understand me, i'm not saying that my suggestions are the best nor that they all should be implemented. I know many people may have different requests. I'm just saying that the more options and features you will give to your customers and the more they will grow. It might be better than just considering 'your experience'. And no offense here as i see that you already apparently took in consideration some user suggestions.

Thanks again for your help, have a nice christmas (if you're concerned with it) and take care if you're not in good shape

 

[Colors]

Just a small note, the Cayin N5ii can play TIDAL and bypass the SRC of the Android OS because the its default is set at 44.1kHz (which is the same as TIDAL) so no need for resampling.

I found that pretty cool for people who are interested in buying this and using it for streaming apps like TIDAL and offline exclusively like I do.

My XDP300R on the other hand is forced to use SRC to resample TIDAL’s 44.1kHz to 48kHZ.

 

[CayinSupport]

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We would like to express our sincerest appreciation to every comer in this thread for your patience and kind suggestion to Cayin during the whole year!

We are looking to continue the journey of sound with you in 2019!

 

[alter4]

Do you always have this issue and/or did you try rebooting the unit ? Do you also have latest firmware installed ? (mine is 1.3)
Did you also tried to manage a 'Smart cleaning' to see if any background app might be messing something up ?
And finally do you also have the same issue in audio priority mode ?

I never encountered this issue so far and just been testing again and couldn't reproduce it.
There's a small delay between controls and image change for each skin on my end too (controls change first, then the image), but i don't have the wrong control/image association like you seem to have.

To reproduce issue with player skins you need to switch off covers support in settings (yes that is true I don't like see album cover when I listen music, I like player skin pictures). @thedud3 Could you please try with that setting?

P.S. Firmware is 1.4 now. Double wipe etc things don't help. The issue persist in audio priority mode.

 

[bluewrecK]

Just a small note, the Cayin N5ii can play TIDAL and bypass the SRC of the Android OS because the its default is set at 44.1kHz (which is the same as TIDAL) so no need for resampling.

I found that pretty cool for people who are interested in buying this and using it for streaming apps like TIDAL and offline exclusively like I do.

My XDP300R on the other hand is forced to use SRC to resample TIDAL’s 44.1kHz to 48kHZ.

Awesome, I've always wondered this. Have you ever tried running Tidal through UAPP on the N5ii? It supports MQA now.

 

[Colors]

Awesome, I've always wondered this. Have you ever tried running Tidal through UAPP on the N5ii? It supports MQA now.

Does UAPP support TIDAL offline? I've only been using TIDAL offline so I haven't used UAPP yet.

 

[bluewrecK]

Does UAPP support TIDAL offline? I've only been using TIDAL offline so I haven't used UAPP yet.

Ah, it does not.

Random Question: Any reason why you got rid of massdrop+ iems? Sounds amazing with the N5iis!

 

[Colors]

Ah, it does not.

Random Question: Any reason why you got rid of massdrop+ iems? Sounds amazing with the N5iis!

It does (especially with the Ares II cable) but I wanted to try out other things.

 

[CayinSupport]

Have the same issue but ready to live with that.

Issue with noise in headphones when the my N5iiS starts looks only happens with low impedance high sensitivity headphones. But I'll check 32Ohm headphones I soon as I get them from a friend and post results here. Another issue that bothers me is the following:
Player skins changing doesn't work normally. On first click it changes controls but not skin. Later when I unlock player it open player with previously selected skin, then in a second it changes skin to something else. (See I recorded video ) Could anybody confirm this?

And last but not the list Is there any official reply from cayin support related "google services" issue? Have I missed something?

Dear alter4, our after-sale support has feedback to you through email already regarding your skin issue, please kindly check your email box.Thank you!

 

[alter4]

Dear alter4, our after-sale support has feedback to you through email already regarding your skin issue, please kindly check your email box.Thank you!

I replied in email, by the way I would like to know whether anybody in this forum could reproduce the issue. (Don't forget to switch off covers support slider in settings to reproduce the issue.)