[fejnomit]

Cross-post from the Watercooler thread:
So I wanted to check back in with some results/ruminations about by mini source-odyssey.

I was quite smitten with the RS8 for many months, as you may know. And then I got the itch.

The culprit was the Cayin RU7. It opened my eyes as to what a dongle could achieve - to such an extent that I began to wonder if I needed a full-sized DAP at all, especially given my more mobile-oriented listening time. Anyway, I fell completely in love with the RU7-Dunu Falcon Ultra combo for travel situations, played out of my iPhone. I can get a tight seal and it has excellent bass with the gold nozzles, which works quite well in the car or bus or train or plane. As mentioned before, the bass lift helps mitigate the ambient noise of those transportation modes. The depth and layering of the combo is outstanding.

But, as much as the RU7 itself, I realized I had fallen in love with the Cayin house-sound, or at least the 1-bit version of it, so I bought an N7 and put it through its paces both as a stand-alone streamer and as a tethered USB/Dac.

I was quite under-impressed with it vis-a-vis the RU7. Which is more praise for the dongle than a diss of the DAP.

The N7 seemed to bring much the same level of warmth and detail to the picture, maybe a bit more dynamism, a slightly blacker background, but its staging and depth actually seemed less. So whereas I had originally thought that if the N7 was "good enough," I would sell the RS8 and pocket the difference for some new IEMs, I was now wondering if the RU7 might be enough for both mobile and desk listening and I could pocket a much larger difference and put all that toward a TOTL iem.

All this comparative listening was done with the Noble Ronin, by the way, perhaps not the best match for the 1-bit sound, but it's what I have on me and it's my favorite IEM of all. I went back and forth between the N7 and RU7 until I decided that there was not enough of a difference to justify keeping the N7.

Then I thought about the L&P W4 and some of the praise it's been getting, along with my new-found respect for dongles, so I ordered one and went through the same comps with N7 and RU7. But again, I decided that the RU7 was my favorite, espeically at its price. The W4 just didn't have that fuller, richer timbre, centered on the mid-bass, that I had come to love on the RU7. It was a tad cleaner. But I am not a clean guy.

Then I happened to read something about the Hiby Music Pro app in the N30LE thread and that it allowed for Qobuz streaming, not just Tidal, and that the sound through the app was better than using the Qobuz app alone. This led me to investigate. I realized I had an older version of Hiby Music Pro on my N7 and promptly upgraded. Then, with some difficulty, I found how to stream Qobuz through the app. It's a tiny bit buggy, but it did sound better. Yet the biggest advantage of this by far was that I could now use the Hiby app-embedded verions of their plug-ins and MSEB, which I had come to love on the RS8. More specifically, the Sound Field and Spatialize plug-ins.

Whoa!

Playing around with these two plug-ins utterly transformed what I heard from the N7. The imaging and depth were suddenly outstanding and I felt greater dynamics, a clearer, fuller midrange (though still quite warm) and just enough treble sparkle added to balance out the overall darkness of the 1-bit sound. This worked on local files through the app as well.

So I changed my mind yet again and decided the N7 was a keeper for this reason alone. Qobuz is what I listen to most of the time. I could never get the N7 to sound great using HQPlayer and Roon but now I didn't have to. It could be a stand-alone, and it wasn't anywhere near as heavy as the RS8, so I might actually haul it around.

So now the plan was, I would sell the W4 and the RS8 and use that cash for a very good set of IEMs.

I was getting excited about this direction, actively reading up on more technical, reference, V-shaped IEMs to complement my Ronins, when I thought about the Hiby plug-ins and MSEB and remembered how good they had sounded on the RS8. All this time, the RS8 had reamined boxed up and for sale.

So I pulled a Scuby.

I decided to fire up the RS8 one more time, as a sort of farewell verification that I had made the right choice.

Wrong move.

I got Qobuz set up through the Hiby Music app (which I had never done before on the RS8) and I was able to go beyond the app-specific versions of the plug-ins and MSEB and use the global versions that come with the DAP.

And my socks were knocked off.

The only way I can make any sense of it is that I had not listened to Qubuz through HMP on the RS8 before, I had not properly played around with Soundfield and Mastermind and Dynamics plug-ins, and my ears had grown used to the 1-bit sound on the Cayin devices, forgetting the R2R sound of the RS8.

But that forgetting, it seems, was important.

What greeted my ears was a massively more powerful and dynamic low-end, wider and deeper, yet more textured and coming out of a dark chasm of silence. Then a clear, forward midrange with great note weight yet sharper transients; a wider soundfield with more precise imaging (which you can really crank up with the Dynamics plug-in) and width/depth/layering that gave me goosebumps, as if I were inside a perfectly treated listening room with full-sized speakers activating all the air around me. And I could continue to tweak the sound as I saw fit.

It was night and day compared to the N7. In addition, the RS8 works extremely well as a DAC/amp, where I can use HQPlayer to upsample to the highest PCM rate before the RS8 does its magic. The result is so far beyond anything I have heard throughout this odyssey that I cannot fathom anything sounding better.

So my N7 is for sale along with my W4 and my lovely RU7 is my travel companion, nothing more.

The RS8 just secured its spot as my go-to source.

Anyway, i just wanted to share this journey with the 'Cooler. I thought many of you could identify with it, especially with the back-and-forth and rediscovery aspects of it. Also wanted to praise Hiby for what they have done with the RS8 - its incredible combination of that smooth, analogue R2R tonality with the near-infinate maleability of the signal through the plug-ins and MSEB. Hard to imagine it not giving me many more years of joy to come.

 

[Script999]

Cross-post from the Watercooler thread:
So I wanted to check back in with some results/ruminations about by mini source-odyssey.

I was quite smitten with the RS8 for many months, as you may know. And then I got the itch.

The culprit was the Cayin RU7. It opened my eyes as to what a dongle could achieve - to such an extent that I began to wonder if I needed a full-sized DAP at all, especially given my more mobile-oriented listening time. Anyway, I fell completely in love with the RU7-Dunu Falcon Ultra combo for travel situations, played out of my iPhone. I can get a tight seal and it has excellent bass with the gold nozzles, which works quite well in the car or bus or train or plane. As mentioned before, the bass lift helps mitigate the ambient noise of those transportation modes. The depth and layering of the combo is outstanding.

But, as much as the RU7 itself, I realized I had fallen in love with the Cayin house-sound, or at least the 1-bit version of it, so I bought an N7 and put it through its paces both as a stand-alone streamer and as a tethered USB/Dac.

I was quite under-impressed with it vis-a-vis the RU7. Which is more praise for the dongle than a diss of the DAP.

The N7 seemed to bring much the same level of warmth and detail to the picture, maybe a bit more dynamism, a slightly blacker background, but its staging and depth actually seemed less. So whereas I had originally thought that if the N7 was "good enough," I would sell the RS8 and pocket the difference for some new IEMs, I was now wondering if the RU7 might be enough for both mobile and desk listening and I could pocket a much larger difference and put all that toward a TOTL iem.

All this comparative listening was done with the Noble Ronin, by the way, perhaps not the best match for the 1-bit sound, but it's what I have on me and it's my favorite IEM of all. I went back and forth between the N7 and RU7 until I decided that there was not enough of a difference to justify keeping the N7.

Then I thought about the L&P W4 and some of the praise it's been getting, along with my new-found respect for dongles, so I ordered one and went through the same comps with N7 and RU7. But again, I decided that the RU7 was my favorite, espeically at its price. The W4 just didn't have that fuller, richer timbre, centered on the mid-bass, that I had come to love on the RU7. It was a tad cleaner. But I am not a clean guy.

Then I happened to read something about the Hiby Music Pro app in the N30LE thread and that it allowed for Qobuz streaming, not just Tidal, and that the sound through the app was better than using the Qobuz app alone. This led me to investigate. I realized I had an older version of Hiby Music Pro on my N7 and promptly upgraded. Then, with some difficulty, I found how to stream Qobuz through the app. It's a tiny bit buggy, but it did sound better. Yet the biggest advantage of this by far was that I could now use the Hiby app-embedded verions of their plug-ins and MSEB, which I had come to love on the RS8. More specifically, the Sound Field and Spatialize plug-ins.

Whoa!

Playing around with these two plug-ins utterly transformed what I heard from the N7. The imaging and depth were suddenly outstanding and I felt greater dynamics, a clearer, fuller midrange (though still quite warm) and just enough treble sparkle added to balance out the overall darkness of the 1-bit sound. This worked on local files through the app as well.

So I changed my mind yet again and decided the N7 was a keeper for this reason alone. Qobuz is what I listen to most of the time. I could never get the N7 to sound great using HQPlayer and Roon but now I didn't have to. It could be a stand-alone, and it wasn't anywhere near as heavy as the RS8, so I might actually haul it around.

So now the plan was, I would sell the W4 and the RS8 and use that cash for a very good set of IEMs.

I was getting excited about this direction, actively reading up on more technical, reference, V-shaped IEMs to complement my Ronins, when I thought about the Hiby plug-ins and MSEB and remembered how good they had sounded on the RS8. All this time, the RS8 had reamined boxed up and for sale.

So I pulled a Scuby.

I decided to fire up the RS8 one more time, as a sort of farewell verification that I had made the right choice.

Wrong move.

I got Qobuz set up through the Hiby Music app (which I had never done before on the RS8) and I was able to go beyond the app-specific versions of the plug-ins and MSEB and use the global versions that come with the DAP.

And my socks were knocked off.

The only way I can make any sense of it is that I had not listened to Qubuz through HMP on the RS8 before, I had not properly played around with Soundfield and Mastermind and Dynamics plug-ins, and my ears had grown used to the 1-bit sound on the Cayin devices, forgetting the R2R sound of the RS8.

But that forgetting, it seems, was important.

What greeted my ears was a massively more powerful and dynamic low-end, wider and deeper, yet more textured and coming out of a dark chasm of silence. Then a clear, forward midrange with great note weight yet sharper transients; a wider soundfield with more precise imaging (which you can really crank up with the Dynamics plug-in) and width/depth/layering that gave me goosebumps, as if I were inside a perfectly treated listening room with full-sized speakers activating all the air around me. And I could continue to tweak the sound as I saw fit.

It was night and day compared to the N7. In addition, the RS8 works extremely well as a DAC/amp, where I can use HQPlayer to upsample to the highest PCM rate before the RS8 does its magic. The result is so far beyond anything I have heard throughout this odyssey that I cannot fathom anything sounding better.

So my N7 is for sale along with my W4 and my lovely RU7 is my travel companion, nothing more.

The RS8 just secured its spot as my go-to source.

Anyway, i just wanted to share this journey with the 'Cooler. I thought many of you could identify with it, especially with the back-and-forth and rediscovery aspects of it. Also wanted to praise Hiby for what they have done with the RS8 - its incredible combination of that smooth, analogue R2R tonality with the near-infinate maleability of the signal through the plug-ins and MSEB. Hard to imagine it not giving me many more years of joy to come.

Great write up!
Great comparison!
Thank you for all the effort you put into your journey of optimizing the SQ and sharing it with us!

 

[MatW]

Cross-post from the Watercooler thread:
So I wanted to check back in with some results/ruminations about by mini source-odyssey.

I was quite smitten with the RS8 for many months, as you may know. And then I got the itch.

The culprit was the Cayin RU7. It opened my eyes as to what a dongle could achieve - to such an extent that I began to wonder if I needed a full-sized DAP at all, especially given my more mobile-oriented listening time. Anyway, I fell completely in love with the RU7-Dunu Falcon Ultra combo for travel situations, played out of my iPhone. I can get a tight seal and it has excellent bass with the gold nozzles, which works quite well in the car or bus or train or plane. As mentioned before, the bass lift helps mitigate the ambient noise of those transportation modes. The depth and layering of the combo is outstanding.

But, as much as the RU7 itself, I realized I had fallen in love with the Cayin house-sound, or at least the 1-bit version of it, so I bought an N7 and put it through its paces both as a stand-alone streamer and as a tethered USB/Dac.

I was quite under-impressed with it vis-a-vis the RU7. Which is more praise for the dongle than a diss of the DAP.

The N7 seemed to bring much the same level of warmth and detail to the picture, maybe a bit more dynamism, a slightly blacker background, but its staging and depth actually seemed less. So whereas I had originally thought that if the N7 was "good enough," I would sell the RS8 and pocket the difference for some new IEMs, I was now wondering if the RU7 might be enough for both mobile and desk listening and I could pocket a much larger difference and put all that toward a TOTL iem.

All this comparative listening was done with the Noble Ronin, by the way, perhaps not the best match for the 1-bit sound, but it's what I have on me and it's my favorite IEM of all. I went back and forth between the N7 and RU7 until I decided that there was not enough of a difference to justify keeping the N7.

Then I thought about the L&P W4 and some of the praise it's been getting, along with my new-found respect for dongles, so I ordered one and went through the same comps with N7 and RU7. But again, I decided that the RU7 was my favorite, espeically at its price. The W4 just didn't have that fuller, richer timbre, centered on the mid-bass, that I had come to love on the RU7. It was a tad cleaner. But I am not a clean guy.

Then I happened to read something about the Hiby Music Pro app in the N30LE thread and that it allowed for Qobuz streaming, not just Tidal, and that the sound through the app was better than using the Qobuz app alone. This led me to investigate. I realized I had an older version of Hiby Music Pro on my N7 and promptly upgraded. Then, with some difficulty, I found how to stream Qobuz through the app. It's a tiny bit buggy, but it did sound better. Yet the biggest advantage of this by far was that I could now use the Hiby app-embedded verions of their plug-ins and MSEB, which I had come to love on the RS8. More specifically, the Sound Field and Spatialize plug-ins.

Whoa!

Playing around with these two plug-ins utterly transformed what I heard from the N7. The imaging and depth were suddenly outstanding and I felt greater dynamics, a clearer, fuller midrange (though still quite warm) and just enough treble sparkle added to balance out the overall darkness of the 1-bit sound. This worked on local files through the app as well.

So I changed my mind yet again and decided the N7 was a keeper for this reason alone. Qobuz is what I listen to most of the time. I could never get the N7 to sound great using HQPlayer and Roon but now I didn't have to. It could be a stand-alone, and it wasn't anywhere near as heavy as the RS8, so I might actually haul it around.

So now the plan was, I would sell the W4 and the RS8 and use that cash for a very good set of IEMs.

I was getting excited about this direction, actively reading up on more technical, reference, V-shaped IEMs to complement my Ronins, when I thought about the Hiby plug-ins and MSEB and remembered how good they had sounded on the RS8. All this time, the RS8 had reamined boxed up and for sale.

So I pulled a Scuby.

I decided to fire up the RS8 one more time, as a sort of farewell verification that I had made the right choice.

Wrong move.

I got Qobuz set up through the Hiby Music app (which I had never done before on the RS8) and I was able to go beyond the app-specific versions of the plug-ins and MSEB and use the global versions that come with the DAP.

And my socks were knocked off.

The only way I can make any sense of it is that I had not listened to Qubuz through HMP on the RS8 before, I had not properly played around with Soundfield and Mastermind and Dynamics plug-ins, and my ears had grown used to the 1-bit sound on the Cayin devices, forgetting the R2R sound of the RS8.

But that forgetting, it seems, was important.

What greeted my ears was a massively more powerful and dynamic low-end, wider and deeper, yet more textured and coming out of a dark chasm of silence. Then a clear, forward midrange with great note weight yet sharper transients; a wider soundfield with more precise imaging (which you can really crank up with the Dynamics plug-in) and width/depth/layering that gave me goosebumps, as if I were inside a perfectly treated listening room with full-sized speakers activating all the air around me. And I could continue to tweak the sound as I saw fit.

It was night and day compared to the N7. In addition, the RS8 works extremely well as a DAC/amp, where I can use HQPlayer to upsample to the highest PCM rate before the RS8 does its magic. The result is so far beyond anything I have heard throughout this odyssey that I cannot fathom anything sounding better.

So my N7 is for sale along with my W4 and my lovely RU7 is my travel companion, nothing more.

The RS8 just secured its spot as my go-to source.

Anyway, i just wanted to share this journey with the 'Cooler. I thought many of you could identify with it, especially with the back-and-forth and rediscovery aspects of it. Also wanted to praise Hiby for what they have done with the RS8 - its incredible combination of that smooth, analogue R2R tonality with the near-infinate maleability of the signal through the plug-ins and MSEB. Hard to imagine it not giving me many more years of joy to come.

Glad it worked for you!

I have played around with the plugins a little and I really liked what Soundfield did for Trifecta for example. But what I don’t like about it is that it’s basically EQ, which I don’t mind as such, but without info on the adjustments being made, it’s pretty much a black box. So in the end I’ve stopped messing with the various settings and I’m sticking to NOS.

 

[fejnomit]

Glad it worked for you!

I have played around with the plugins a little and I really liked what Soundfield did for Trifecta for example. But what I don’t like about it is that it’s basically EQ, which I don’t mind as such, but without info on the adjustments being made, it’s pretty much a black box. So in the end I’ve stopped messing with the various settings and I’m sticking to NOS.

I hear you. For me it's one of the rare instances where I don't question it. I am a purity guy through and through. Hence my astonishment. Also, Soundfield, to my ears, is less of an EQ and more of a crossfeed effect. It's less about tonal changes and more about perceived listening position and room effects. Again, to my ears

 

[audionewbi]

To the members who own the Meze Empyrean, do you guys still like the pairing with RS8? Recently, I had a chance to demo the DH9200, which now Im considering over Meze, only because it is a lot cheaper and due to its closed-back design, it really isolates well.

Thank you.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Glad it worked for you!

I have played around with the plugins a little and I really liked what Soundfield did for Trifecta for example. But what I don’t like about it is that it’s basically EQ, which I don’t mind as such, but without info on the adjustments being made, it’s pretty much a black box. So in the end I’ve stopped messing with the various settings and I’m sticking to NOS.

I can confirm that it is nothing of the sort (EQ) .

I hear you. For me it's one of the rare instances where I don't question it. I am a purity guy through and through. Hence my astonishment. Also, Soundfield, to my ears, is less of an EQ and more of a crossfeed effect. It's less about tonal changes and more about perceived listening position and room effects. Again, to my ears

It is, indeed, purely a matter of adding or subtracting the two channels from one another. I personally prefer a full crossfeed incorporating realistic interaural time difference and frequency variable interaural intensity difference, and indeed even a convolution-based full room simulation, but I can see other people preferring the total simplicity and "purity" of Soundfield.

 

[audionewbi]

@Joe Bloggs Do you have any eta on when Hiby will release RS8 firmware, integrating your amazing filters are part of the player-Permanent fixtures?

 

[fejnomit]

It is, indeed, purely a matter of adding or subtracting the two channels from one another. I personally prefer a full crossfeed incorporating realistic interaural time difference and frequency variable interaural intensity difference, and indeed even a convolution-based full room simulation, but I can see other people preferring the total simplicity and "purity" of Soundfield.

Is such a thing available as a plugin?

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Is such a thing available as a plugin?

Yea?

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hib...s-and-impressions-thread.964900/post-17690409

The Convolution plugin with the file I provided.

 

[fejnomit]

Yea?

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hib...s-and-impressions-thread.964900/post-17690409

The Convolution plugin with the file I provided.

So sorry I seem to have missed that. Thank you for redirecting me!

 

[LucasKA]

To the members who own the Meze Empyrean, do you guys still like the pairing with RS8? Recently, I had a chance to demo the DH9200, which now Im considering over Meze, only because it is a lot cheaper and due to its closed-back design, it really isolates well.

Thank you.

I don’t have the Denon 9200 but owned the 7000, I would say the best headphone to buy is the XTC headphone by JM Audio, he can tuned the headphone to your preference and it sounds way better than headphone below £2000 for much less, and some even argue it rival top of the line.

I used the closed back version tuned warmed detailed with rs8 and love it, hopefully saving up for the 2.5 euphoric version soon.

 

[Newsee]

To the members who own the Meze Empyrean, do you guys still like the pairing with RS8? Recently, I had a chance to demo the DH9200, which now Im considering over Meze, only because it is a lot cheaper and due to its closed-back design, it really isolates well.

Thank you.

I still love that pairing.

If isolation is important for you, take the Denon (or consider Meze Liric or ZMF Atrium closed)
If price is important for you, take the Denon.

Otherwise take the Empy.
I still have not found any closed back that can compete with the open back ones.

 

[Froller]

Hey, everybody! Has anyone noticed (maybe only me unlucky) that if in RS8 settings you put a limit for charging, (60% for example) and listen, then after the moment when the battery reaches this value, in one ear (I use the balanced output, 12 Ohms IEM) there is a faint rustle similar to a chirping. I'll try to catch it on a measuring bench (my little hobby), but it's weird. I have used different chargers up to ifi powerX. From the battery everything is fine, while charging is going on - everything is also out of hearing range.
@Joe Bloggs perhaps you can shed some light on this annoying issue?

 

[fejnomit]

Hey, everybody! Has anyone noticed (maybe only me unlucky) that if in RS8 settings you put a limit for charging, (60% for example) and listen, then after the moment when the battery reaches this value, in one ear (I use the balanced output, 12 Ohms IEM) there is a faint rustle similar to a chirping. I'll try to catch it on a measuring bench (my little hobby), but it's weird. I have used different chargers up to ifi powerX. From the battery everything is fine, while charging is going on - everything is also out of hearing range.
@Joe Bloggs perhaps you can shed some light on this annoying issue?

I never charge and listen at the same time.

 

[gLer]

I never charge and listen at the same time.

Was about to say the same thing...