So this is what we are doing right now. When R&D finalized their circuit design, supply chain will place order for the components and engineers will start to transfer the design to production, the process will take 2 months but the N8 is so complicated and involve a lot of new design and implementation, we expect the process will take a little bit longer then our average practice. We need to go through the finest details and optimize the design before we mass production.
Take the Nutube installation as example, we have to minimize the microphonics effect which is a common issue in tube amplification, It doesn't necessarily be an expensive procedure, but the implication to sound performance is noticeable. As you can see in these photos, Cayin didn't solved the problem by using expensive components, we rely on our know how and experience. The solutions probably looks boring or even disgusting to some, but it works effectively.
Another important optimization is to clean up the circuit layout, get rids of the ground loops and isolate the circuit into layers properly. We have issued a new PCB layout earlier this week, and hopefully the revised N8 engineering samples will just in time for the Toyko Portable Audio Festival (14-15 July 2018) and CanJam London (21-22 July 2018), so if you will attend one of these shows, please drop by Cayin booth and check out our N8 DAP.
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We have received the revised PCB on 11th, and the 90% stuffed board is ready for test today. If you look at the photo carefully, you'll notice the day code is 20180605, and the Nutube photo that I showed here l(#539) is dated 20180426. So things are move on very quickly and we should be able to demo this revision at Toyko and London. If everything goes well, this will be our final revision and we can proceed to production version after this.
There is a blank area in the last photo, that is where we'll install the Nutube. The previous NuTube photo has illustrated the trick we are experimenting to reduce microphonic of Nutube. Turn out that trick is very useful when we test it at our laboratory, but when we pick up N8 to walk around in our factory, we know we need to reinforce our shock absorption design to make sure the Nutube will perform satisfactory even when someone holding or even shaking the N8 while listening.
And the final design will look like this:
we literally developed a suspension system for the Nutube installation. Let's see if we can build this promptly and test it at the July event.
Thanks mate
Yes a headphone amplifier without the speaker out circuit.We don't have any plan to develop an all-in-one unit based on CS-100DAC. There are many reasons behind this decision but the most obvious one is space availability. Take a look at the internal layout of latest CS-100DAC Engineering Sample:
As you can see the CS-100DAC is fully packed already, if we want to add a decent (and comparable quality) amplifier into the chassis, it will most likely end up into something that is too big to be practical.
An amp only HA-300? Do you mean speaker amplifier version of HA-300? or Headphone amplifier without the speaker output?
