Not sure how I feel about this DAP yet.
I was very excited to receive the package in the evening, after a slight delay. Began with a firmware update which took quite a bit of time. Smooth sailing so far with no issues. Packaging is pretty basic IMO considering the price of admission, except for the nice wooden case. The leather case on the other hand is crap. If you look at the picture above, the screen protrudes quite a bit above the casing, so if you drop this $2800 DAP, that's it. And both sides are wide open, so you're always holding it, bare metal. likely to see some wear over time. 6" 2K LCD screen is awesome and perfect size for my use case (streaming, roon, etc.), and the secondary screen which i'd initially thought gimmicky, turned out to be unobtrusive in 'reverse' mode and useful to easily set consistent volume level. And boy, this thing is snappy with zero lag. And no issues with wifi performance.
Now, minor annoyances and some frustration.................
There's no swiping up from the home screen to get to the app drawer. so all icons just reside in home screen, albeit you can create multiple pages to hide it. Maybe it's just me, but this bothered me quite a bit. And no icon sorting by name. And you can only have four icons in the bottom icon bar (Hiby does 5 in a much smaller screen). The gesture navigation didn't work too well either. In general, Hiby and Cayin's SW felt more polished. M9 gets quite warm when playing music.
I couldn't get UAPP to work in bit-perfect mode. It only worked thru Android. I also couldn't get Roon to work. And I'm not talking about Android downsampling. I just didn't get any playback in Roon. It would just continuously skip to the next track without sound. Never had this issue with other DAPs in the past. It's a real bummer for me, as I mainly use those two apps and love the UI. The biggest problem for me was the lack of sound after a long screen off/idle time. On three separate occasions (mind you this was all within the first 5 hours of receiving the unit), I lost sound completely regardless of which player I used (UAPP, HIBY, Shanling, Tidal) and had to reboot the system as a remedy. And Shanling, I'm sorry to say this but your music player app is atrocious. Terrible UI. And no sorting by album artists?
But then, the sound. I really really like how it sounds.
I've only had it for a few hours, and I would usually say, there's not a huge difference between various DAPs in terms of sound quality, but compared to the Hiby R6 2020, it's noticeably less harsh in the treble and more weight across the frequencies with good resolution. Music just sounded more natural in general.
To sum the initial impression, it's a flagship with killer hardware specs and a flagship sound, but with some quirks, mediocre UI, and an unpolished software. But that sound, I cannot fault.
Not yet sure if I want to keep this unit. I feel like even with it's glorious sound, Hiby R6 2020 is the sweet spot considering its practicality (size, weight, SW stability, UI, etc.) and dollar to performance ratio.
More to follow.
, but also provide perfect synergy. It's also dead quiet. Zero noise to include EMI/RFI. I'm definitely keeping this.
