[gadus]

I received the n7, I hope to share impressions soon,
Meanwhile I can say that he looks very beautiful and impressive.

 

[Sound Eq]

greetings did some experience change in sound after updating firmware

 

[Auricon]

greetings did some experience change in sound after updating firmware

Nah, no sound change but improved playback of Tidal Masters and other bugs.

 

[Tom75]

Usually no need, battery holds good. Connecting two cables are more complicated then just one when changing from stationary to mobile use and back.
But it works with both, tried once. No additional noise when using Hiby docking station for charging.

What do you mean by Hiby control? The HibyCast?

Yes exactly. The Hiby cast function.

 

[gadus]

Initial impressions before the run,
Very analog sound with a very realistic and natural feeling, on a really big stage,
lots of details,
In combination with ferrum oor+hypsos (bypass mode and pre out hige gain) and dca expanse, the feeling that the expanse comes to life, the sound is 'alive', excellent dynamics,
A very 'real' feeling and the stage has grown noticeably,
As mentioned, this is only preliminary before running,

 

[ctsooner22]

An audiophile friend told me that he connected the n7 to a stereo system worth 500k
According to him, it was very difficult to distinguish the differences between the n7 and the prestigious dac in the system...

I’ll be getting an N7 in my system in about 2 weeks or so. I used Vandersteen Quatro CT speakers, Vandersteen M5 mono blocks, Vandersteen preamp, Brinkmann Nyquist mk2 DAC/Streamer and The Memory Player by Laufer Techniques. All cables and cords are top end Audioquest including their Niagara 3000 with Dragon power cord.

I can’t wait to hear it with my Empire Ear Odins as that’s my travel gear. I also will try out just the DAC portion on my main rig to see how it stacks up. I highly doubt it will be close to my Brinkmann and it shouldn’t be (Brinkmann costs 20k or so). I’m open minded as I’ve been doing this since 1973 or so. I do look forward as I love the N8

 

[Loftprojection]

I’ll be getting an N7 in my system in about 2 weeks or so. I used Vandersteen Quatro CT speakers, Vandersteen M5 mono blocks, Vandersteen preamp, Brinkmann Nyquist mk2 DAC/Streamer and The Memory Player by Laufer Techniques. All cables and cords are top end Audioquest including their Niagara 3000 with Dragon power cord.

I can’t wait to hear it with my Empire Ear Odins as that’s my travel gear. I also will try out just the DAC portion on my main rig to see how it stacks up. I highly doubt it will be close to my Brinkmann and it shouldn’t be (Brinkmann costs 20k or so). I’m open minded as I’ve been doing this since 1973 or so. I do look forward as I love the N8

When you do, please tell us if the music files you used were PCM or DSD. I read a review on another site where the reviewer, with an top system like you, was not so impressed when using PCM files and very impressed with SACD records or DSD files of the same songs. Thanks

 

[Andykong]

When you do, please tell us if the music files you used were PCM or DSD. I read a review on another site where the reviewer, with an top system like you, was not so impressed when using PCM files and very impressed with SACD records or DSD files of the same songs. Thanks

So because the DSD performance is surprisingly good, and the PCM performance is not as good as DSD, then the DAP is not suitable for PCM? Is this really logical?

This is like comparing the performance of 3.5mm of N7 to 4.4mm of N7 with a difficult headphone, and concluding that 3.5mm is not as good as 4.4mm, and therefore 3.5mm becomes unworthy?

IMHO, the more important question are, will PCM playback on N7 be comparable to other 2K DAP? Is it enjoyable to stream N7 with Tidal or Apple Music (100% PCm content) ?

 

[Andykong]

It allows for a fairly space saving arrangement indeed. It is even more satisfying how much better the Wavelight sounds using the i2s input.

I have not tried to figure out the HW DSD conversion yet.
Looking at the schema from Andy I suppose the API for the players are using the DSD or PCM what goes between MCU and FPGA to put out on the Mini HDMI i2s.

If the internal DAC us to be used then the PCM is looped through the Audio Bridge.
I do not think that the possibility is given to external players to make the loop through the Audio Bridge to play on the i2s interface. I may be wrong, @Andykong could chime in.

I am always using either UAPP or the Qbuz app. I have not found the conversion possibility in any of them yet.
I have not looked the Cayin/HiBy player yet. Would be interesting.

Usually no need, battery holds good. Connecting two cables are more complicated then just one when changing from stationary to mobile use and back.
But it works with both, tried once. No additional noise when using Hiby docking station for charging.

What do you mean by Hiby control? The HibyCast?

That's a very nice system you have there. Brovo.
But I think this is about time to look for a rack

I believe all three digital outputs (I2S, USB Audio, Coaxial) are independent of the pre-DAC digital processing, including the PCM-to-DSD conversion. To make sure I didn't feed the wrong information to you, I have fired the question to our Engineering, hopefully, I can confirm this early next week.

When you connect the N7 to an external DAC, you have put the DAC, LPF, and Headphone Amplifier into idle. That's why the battery hold good. My wild guess is, you can around 20 hours per charge cycle?

 

[Andykong]

Sounds like an interesting experiment. Could you provide more details of what he did? In particular, what output of the N7 he ran into his system, and what the receiving stage was (pre-amplifier?).

I‘m asking this since - as a ballpark rule - the sound characteristics of a DAP are imprinted more by its amplifier stage, and less by its DAC stage. Thus, when you take the DAP true line out, its amp is bypassed, leaving the DAC and only its characteristics in the game. That ballpark rule holds for standard DAPs/DACs with off-the-shelf converter chips - I wouldn‘t know whether it also holds for devices like the N7.

Your comments are highly welcome.

When correctly implemented, this is always true because this is the law of Physics, and that's whey we have C9 in place.

The phone output is the primary load-bearing output in the DAP, so naturally this is the bottleneck of the system. On the other hand, when you take away this loading, you have indirectly improved the power supply to DAC circuit because you have removed the biggest power consumption subsystem, hence other subsystems will have more reserve (or headroom?) in power supply.

In the case of N7, when you remove the Amplifier in the chain, you have also removed a heat source in the system, that will allow the discrete DAC circuit to run cooler, hence lower TCR noise, this is unique to the discrete resistor network DAC.

.

 

[Andykong]

There‘s always something „better“, e.g. Brise Audio Tsuranagi
Question imho from a use case perspective is if a relatively affordable C9 is better longterm value with changeable batteries plus different tunings with Class A/AB and Nutube/SS

I will stick to that for now

I see, C9 is relatively affordable. We are glad to have you on our side

 

[ctsooner22]

Guys, I'm with Andy on this. I have PCM in WAV format as I like it better than Flac if both are recorded well. I also have a fair amount of DSD that I have access to (I need my buddy to download some more for me). Nearly all my WAV files are 24 or 32 bit and much of it is well recorded for the audiophile in us all. I also have many recordings that were recorded live by professionals. They are ripped directly from reel to reel and very resolving. I listen to all types of music. I've only owned AK DAP's, but got to hear ALL DAP's in Tokyo and liked the Cayin's best in each price range. I also liked the Sony. I was using my own Odin's when auditioning. Nothing too scientific, just a few music cuts per and I went back and forth between the high end DAP's and used the same cuts.
Really looking forward to hearing the N7 as I'd be using it in portable mode if I decide to buy one.

 

[Andykong]

I said it before Andy, maybe you guys are going to listen to my wish! Hahaha. Take the N7 DAC section to make a dedicated small desktop or ever better transportable form factor DAC. With the upgraded parts the bigger form factor will provide versus N7 (or RU7), you will have another ultimate winner to market and we will have another option to get the great Cayin sound.

If we want to move up the ladder, we can scale up the 1-bit resistor network without a lot of problems, but as per our explanation, the most significant bottleneck of R-2R DAC is the quality and matching of resistors. For 1-Bit DAC, they are less demanding on the resistors, but very demanding in the pre-processing DSP and power supply to the DAC circuit as well as the auxiliary system "around" the DAC. These improvements take time to develop, especially when Cayin is only a new kid in town. Our first attempt at a discrete resistor network DAC was in May 2021 (when we release R01 Audio Motherboard), which is 2 years from now only. Since our competitors has spent 5-10 years in this game already, there is a lot for us to catch up.

 

[Andykong]

wonder if members prefer using tidal through its official app, or using tidal through usb audio player app

If you need offline mode, then you'll need to stick with the official app. Otherwise, UAPP is a nice integration to put several streaming service behind one uniform UI and feature sets.

 

[Loftprojection]

So because the DSD performance is surprisingly good, and the PCM performance is not as good as DSD, then the DAP is not suitable for PCM? Is this really logical?

This is like comparing the performance of 3.5mm of N7 to 4.4mm of N7 with a difficult headphone, and concluding that 3.5mm is not as good as 4.4mm, and therefore 3.5mm becomes unworthy?

IMHO, the more important question are, will PCM playback on N7 be comparable to other 2K DAP? Is it enjoyable to stream N7 with Tidal or Apple Music (100% PCm content) ?

Hello Andy, please don't take my question as a critic of N7, far from it. As customers however, $2k DAP is not small change so I think we are entitled to try to define as precisely as possible the highly positive attributes of a new product, as well as the ones that may not be as great. Up to now their hasn't been a lot of info published on the LO performance using PCM vs DSD files. I was just curious to get some subjective but qualitative info from someone who has a very high quality system he wants to plug his N7 into. Very sorry if my question seemed to be negative towards the N7.