I'm so sorry for this comment again - I should have contacted Andi-Kong personally somehow.
Unfortunately, I have no experience with forums - I have only been a quiet follower until now!
I know a lot of quacks in all industries and I absolutely don't count Andi-Kong among them.
On the contrary, I consider his communication to be “exemplary”.
I consider the disclosure of design drawings until shortly before the disclosure of trade secrets to be unique and I value his honesty extremely - even if I feel personally misunderstood - but that is certainly "also" due to my inadequate ability to express myself in foreign languages.
I chose Cayin not least because of this extraordinary customer relationship.
Sure, with all the sympathy for Andi-Kong, the product was ultimately decisive and that speaks absolutely for Cayin
Sorry for this irritation on my part
I understand English is not your native language and have given the benefit of doubt in my first reply, but whey you continue and causing further damage, I feel the need to response because I don't want this to become a daily question until we launch N8ii.
To me, the question is not use of language, but more about attitude. So your method is a high-end approach, and other methods are deviated (or goodbye) from high-end. You have label everything other than your own approach in negative terms, and have put in all sorts of negative assumptions when you encounter a different approach.
For example, you are a purist, you only listen to your high quality music library, you don't stream, streaming will down grade quality, high-end DAP shouldn't devote resource to support streaming, streaming DAP is not high-end DAP.
Likewise, others can follow the same logic: I am a purist, I don't EQ, EQ will downgrade quality, high-end DAP shouldn't devote resource to support EQ, DAP with EQ is not high-end DAP?
Regarding your assumptions:
"I understand that Cayin gives in to the general customer request pressure and makes him capable of streaming - but that means that you have to install all the necessary "crap" (Android, WiFi chip, etc.) and say goodbye the next high-end player."
"I “think” I know how the N8II will be - I don't blame you for that"
What is the biggest stumbling block when someone want to develop a TOTL purist non-Android DAP?
Your answer is to act economically, gives in to the general customer request pressure.
My answer is availability of MCU. No one is making non-Android based MCU with solution for multi-media device.
DAP is a such a niche market that the semiconductor industry can't care less. The MCU of the current "purist" DAP are, in most cases, come from the MP4/video playback devices and non-Android "smartphone" that were commonly available in last (two?) decade. When Android become the industry norm of multimedia and mobile appliance, new MP4/video playback devices and smartphones are all Android based (let's skipped the iOS option for this discussion). The semiconductor industry responds effectively and devoted all their resource to develop MCU with Android system support in mind. As a result, No one is making non-Android based MCU with solution for multi-media device. DAP industry (I know, it is so small that I am not sure if we can all it an industry) is a downstream industry from mobile appliance, when the non-Android based mobile appliance declined, non-Android based DAP are having a hard time to stay competitive.
So can we use the old-time CPU to develop latest flagship "purist" DAP? Yes, but with serious drawbacks and bad user-experience.
Take N8 as example, since we are in the N8 thread. One of the biggest drawback of N8 is the maximum title in music library. When you conduct music scan, N8 will only read the first 20,000 titles. This is because of the limited CPU resource. The CPU of N8 and N3Pro (same CPU) is dated all the way back to 2014, and 20,000 offline music title probably means at that time, but when we have 1TB microSD card readily available (and purist users would like to have TWO microSD slot, with maximum 2TB storage in the DAP), 20,000 music is consider a big drawback. We have stimulated the music library with 30,000 songs, and the database after music scan amounted to over 30MB, that is a huge database for N8/N3Pro CPU and will slow down the responsiveness of some operation. That's why we decided to keep the music scan library limit at 20,000 title. For the record, the limit applies to music scan and all features based on music scan (playback by album, artist, genre etc), music library with over 20,000 titles will have full access to all songs through File Folder options.
Another CPU related problem is EQ. You can consider the EQ in N8 as a DSP function, it consumes a lot of processing power. At the moment, N8 can only perform EQ on 48kHz or below music files. If we expand the coverage to 96kHz or 192kHz, the N8 will suffer from inadequate processing power so this is another deadlock that we can't resolve.
And then we have the UI response problem when you are having a large music library. The Album art thumbnail will take several seconds to display when you scroll up and down at your music library. Again, a bottleneck from insufficient CPU power.
These are all well-known problems to N8 that I have explained many many time in HeadFi forum.
I don't expect users to understand the problems we are facing as product developer, they are not supposed to. Not knowing is not a problem, but making unjustified assumptions as if they are biblical truth, and repeated it day after day, is damaging,
Stay updated on Cayin at their sponsor profile on Head-Fi.
|