[Eyupo92]

Guess what?

I got sick of Hiby's inability to fix Tidal, purchased a Fiio M6 without even listening to it, then shared my impressions comparing both players based on Tidal capabilities on Facebook Hiby User Group page with pictures and so on. Updated last night and went to sleep.

Now I can't reach that Facebook group anymore. Looks like they terminated my group membership.

Great attitude Hiby. Bravo.

 

[mikp]

Guess what?

I got sick of Hiby's inability to fix Tidal, purchased a Fiio M6 without even listening to it, then shared my impressions comparing both players based on Tidal capabilities on Facebook Hiby User Group page with pictures and so on. Updated last night and went to sleep.

Now I can't reach that Facebook group anymore. Looks like they terminated my group membership.

Great attitude Hiby. Bravo.

looks like deleted mentions of m6. also looked at m6, since the r3 has poor bt strength. But probably not that much better on the m6.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Guess what?

I got sick of Hiby's inability to fix Tidal, purchased a Fiio M6 without even listening to it, then shared my impressions comparing both players based on Tidal capabilities on Facebook Hiby User Group page with pictures and so on. Updated last night and went to sleep.

Now I can't reach that Facebook group anymore. Looks like they terminated my group membership.

Great attitude Hiby. Bravo.

Well to be honest I'm sure exactly the same thing would have happened if you were to do this to the "FiiO-philes club". (I was the founder of both groups way back when and I'm not responsible for your removal, but if I were the sole admin at HiBy I'm sure I would be forced to do the same at some point) Being open to criticism is one thing, letting your own fanclub turn into an ad sign for a competing company's products is quite another.

It's unfair to compare the UI of a TIDAL client built from scratch on one of only two players in the world to ever manage to shoehorn a custom audio-centric touchscreen UI on that particular CPU, to one that simply shoehorns Android onto the weakest CPU that will fit and let that take care of everything. Especially on still frames

 

[Eyupo92]

looks like deleted mentions of m6. also looked at m6, since the r3 has poor bt strength. But probably not that much better on the m6.

I will repost all of it here and at M6 thread.

That was unfortunate as I was going to mention quirks of M6 and give credit to Hiby on why they could not ship R3 with Android etc.

As for BT strength. I have noticed this in my short time,

1) The WiFi stutters and cracks heavily when Tidal is streaming MQA album and downloading Tidal tracks to offline, ruining all experience
2 ) BT stutters and cracks heavily when Tidal is streaming MQA and transmitting BT in LDAC Quality First mode; ruining all experience

I first thought that the dual-core CPU was not enough to handle these two tasks simultaneously; then thought RAM was not enough as well - then recognized that BT and WiFi are both handled by the same chip: SAMSUNG S5N5C10B01-6330 So, the chip was limited under a load that downloads from two channels, or downloads at a channel and broadcasting at another channel.

If MQA is streamed from offline Tidal, no sound quality problems with LDAC Quality First mode. If Tidal is streamed in HiFi mode ( not MQA ) and transmitted to LDAC Quality First mode, no SQ problems either.

A note though: I did not believe in burn-in for DAP's - mostly it did not work in iBasso DX90 and was not required on R3; but I have been burning M6 for almost 20 hours now, and the change in sound is really amazing. Those harsh metallic sound which lead me to sell iBasso DX90 has been smoothed out considerably: it is not there yet, but is approaching the smooth R3 sound; in some genres like modern heavy metal subgenres, it already sounds better than R3 to my ears.

 

[Eyupo92]

Well to be honest I'm sure exactly the same thing would have happened if you were to do this to the "FiiO-philes club". (I was the founder of both groups way back when and I'm not responsible for your removal, but if I were the sole admin at HiBy I'm sure I would be forced to do the same at some point) Being open to criticism is one thing, letting your own fanclub turn into an ad sign for a competing company's products is quite another.

It's unfair to compare the UI of a TIDAL client built from scratch on one of only two players in the world to ever manage to shoehorn a custom audio-centric touchscreen UI on that particular CPU, to one that simply shoehorns Android onto the weakest CPU that will fit and let that take care of everything. Especially on still frames

Joe, I respect you because you seem to have gotten the respect in these forums.

But as someone who has worked at a billion dollar consumer electronics manufacturer for 13 years and being responsible for a 200 million dollar product line for 7 of these years, I disagree. This is not the way to handle it. Especially not after begging me to take down my Amazon.com review and offering me a small gift and giving a promise to fix the issues within a reasonable time frame.

Fiio is at least declaring all chips they use in their products, like they did here for M6: https://www.fiio.com/m6_parameters Hiby keeps these chips secret, I might open it and see what is inside to learn and publicly declaring them. Those witheld information includes what the lousy WiFi/BT chip used in R3 actually is as well.

I had a talk with a friend of mine who is a mathematics professor. A student got 30 over 100 in final exam. He came to my friend and said:" I thought my exam was pretty good " My friend replied, "The biggest problem is not that you got 30, you being thinking you had a pretty good exam is the real problem - you simply have no idea what you are studying in this class"

Nowadays I make my living from telling business owners what is delusional thinking and what is not.

Thinking that rewriting a streaming service like Tidal in the form of a UI from last decade is feasible, is delusional thinking. If it is not understood that this was delusional thinking after all these months, then the situation is severe. If it is not understood that the situation is severe, then it is more severe and more delusional.

For gods sake, forget missing all other Tidal functionality: how can you explain the lack of a simple sorting of tracks/albums/artists etc ? how can you explain that this damn thing finding different Tidal access links for some of the tracks/albums/artists than all other Tidal clients in the world - on some albums it is able to play the tracks I mark on other Tidal clients, on some it can't. It is unable to display the tracks it can't stream in grey color; for god's sake it is a simple check and color display.

After spending less than 2 days, I understand why R3 could not be released with Android: Android requires an internal storage, minimum 4 GB. Half of it is reserved to the system, half of it to cache streaming data. Just after a few hours of sampling Tidal tracks, I was shocked to see there was 1,3 GB of cached Tidal data stored on internal storage.

R3 relies on microSD card to store data, but to have an Android build that supports using microSD card as part of internal storage to install OS and apps working from it, it would require at least a microSD card with A1 class description; better with A2 class description - to store cached streaming data and run Android apps from the microSD card. And those cards are considerable more expensive than cards that are not A1 or A2.

When viewed in retrspect in a few years, people will acknowledge the pioneering effort given by Hiby to releasing a good sounding little DAP with streaming services for less than 200 USD price point - after acknowledging how miserably they failed and let others take the market with small Android DAP's with streaming services. I am sure before the end of 2019, there will be dozens of Chinese Android DAPs with streaming services in the market.

 

[HungryPanda]

on nearly every dap thread there are post after post of Tidal woes......... makes one wonder

 

[Eyupo92]

on nearly every dap thread there are post after post of Tidal woes......... makes one wonder

Seems like everybody from people working at Tidal to companies licensing music to Tidal to customers listening to Tidal to companies installing Tidal on devices ... everybody wonders what the hell they are doing. They seem to have everything half-baked at best. Jay-Z and friends buying the company seems to have lead to big internal strifes it seems.

 

[MAK1975]

Tidal was the only game in town if you lived in the US and wanted to stream lossless and 24-bit Masters recordings via MQA. With the release of Qobuz in the US we now have another option. However on the R3 we are stuck with Tidal due to the customized Android lite OS. R6 and R6 Pro users have the ability to use Qobuz and other streaming services due to the full version of Android 8.1 Oreo OS they run. It will be interesting to see if Tidal survives amid all of the woes of controversy of inflating their streaming numbers, lawsuits, and supposed financial troubles. There was a news article back in Dec 2017 that stated they may have had only 6 months left before they ran out of cash (https://www.whathifi.com/news/tidal-in-trouble). I know Sprint bought 33% stake in the company and paid over $200 million. Well it's 2019, and they are still around and doing deals with Lincoln to offer their streaming service in their cars. I doubt Ford would be inking a deal with them if they are on life support. Anyway we have more choices than ever when it comes to streaming. I hope we have at least one Hi-Res streaming service that survives. If Tidal did go under the R3 would be reduced to a local file DAP player with LDAC/Bluetooth. But, I suppose a lot of these "lite Android" DAPs would be in the same boat.

 

[Nolbert0]

I'm finding FW2.X (both 2.01 and 2.1) quite buggy. Especially when connecting to my BT speaker (UE Roll 2) or powering on. It's not uncommon for a 2nd or 3rd reboot to get the thing running. I found the UI in 2.1 to be quite laggy so switched back to 2.01 and the lag issue was cleared but the crashes continue. Which FW are you guys finding most stable?

p.s. I found out the hard way that when you switch off the BT speaker, the R3 simply witches over to coax and continues to play music in perfect silence until the juice runs out. Is this deliberate? Personally, I find it quite frustrating to find out this has happened the following day when you're about to go out and the R3 is conked out. All my other BT sources pause when receiver is turned off so I got used to stopping music via BT this way. I hope I'm not the only one that's finding this to be an issue.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

p.s. I found out the hard way that when you switch off the BT speaker, the R3 simply witches over to coax and continues to play music in perfect silence until the juice runs out. Is this deliberate? Personally, I find it quite frustrating to find out this has happened the following day when you're about to go out and the R3 is conked out. All my other BT sources pause when receiver is turned off so I got used to stopping music via BT this way. I hope I'm not the only one that's finding this to be an issue.

I'd hazard a guess that this is to deal with the possibility that the Bluetooth device gets disconnected temporarily due to interference. After all, we don't automatically resume playback when a BT device is connected...

 

[Nolbert0]

I'd hazard a guess that this is to deal with the possibility that the Bluetooth device gets disconnected temporarily due to interference. After all, we don't automatically resume playback when a BT device is connected...

I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't see the correlation between automatically pausing a terminated connection and resuming playback when connecting. Am I misunderstanding you, or are you misunderstanding me? If it's me misunderstanding you, please explain a little more. But just in case it's you misunderstanding me, let me explain a little further.

For example, playback stops (or pauses) when unplugging headphones and doesn't have to automatically resume playing plugging them back in. The same logic cannot be applied here? All other BT sources (phones and other DAPs) I've used all pause when switching off speaker/receiver. Which is why I was wondering why this doesn't happen here. If it's a matter of interference, shouldn't all BT sources/devices devices do that since it's a limitation of the technology itself? I have very close to no knowledge when it comes to BT which is why I'm asking. So much so that I don't even know if this a stupid question or not.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't see the correlation between automatically pausing a terminated connection and resuming playback when connecting. Am I misunderstanding you, or are you misunderstanding me? If it's me misunderstanding you, please explain a little more. But just in case it's you misunderstanding me, let me explain a little further.

For example, playback stops (or pauses) when unplugging headphones and doesn't have to automatically resume playing plugging them back in. The same logic cannot be applied here? All other BT sources (phones and other DAPs) I've used all pause when switching off speaker/receiver. Which is why I was wondering why this doesn't happen here. If it's a matter of interference, shouldn't all BT sources/devices devices do that since it's a limitation of the technology itself? I have very close to no knowledge when it comes to BT which is why I'm asking. So much so that I don't even know if this a stupid question or not.

What I mean is if it paused on a break in the connection and didn't resume when a connection is made, you would have to press the play button every time a connection is broken and restored by accident.

 

[Tanelorn]

Did anyone manage to rename the equlizer settings? I have differnt settings for different earphones.. and I do not find a way to remane the presets or create own ones.. I do not want to match JAZZ to Earphone 1 and Rock to earphone 2 etc...

 

[Nolbert0]

What I mean is if it paused on a break in the connection and didn't resume when a connection is made, you would have to press the play button every time a connection is broken and restored by accident.

I think I see what you mean, but... Since this is the set behavior of this device only (to my knowledge), unfortunately this leads to a lot more questions. In my experience with BT audio in general, is that connection drops are quite uncommon and haven't actually experienced a full disconnection from receiver unless the battery dies or it went out of range for long enough for the BT connection to time out. In the case of it going out of range, the signal 'breaks up' with intermittent signal but does it's best with broken/weak signal until there is no signal at all. Only then will it will (start countdown for) timeout and pause audio. It takes a good 10 15 seconds for the BT to time out so I don't think pressing play after 15-20 secs is not a problem. If interference works/reacts in a fundamentally different way to a weak signal, my bad and ignore the above, like I said, all I know about this is from experience using it, nothing technical. Since this happens on this device and not on any other that I own, are you anticipating the BT connection from an R3 to be fundamentally weaker and prone to disconnection than say, a Shanling M2s or iPhone SE (where the music pauses when BT receiver is powered down)?

If I understood you right, my next question would be... Is the R3 really sensitive to interference? Was this 'feature' 'designed in' to try and solve a hardware shortcoming not commonly found in other BT devices?

p.s. I recently found out I'm on the spectrum (ASD) so genuine intrigue can quite often come across as pedantic or argumentative (read: being a dick) - or so I've been told. If so, I apologise. Not my intent at all. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond to me.

p.p.s. R3 is by far the BEST (but not perfect) transport for the Mojo EVER, hands down. A silky smooth UI would promote it to LEGENDARY (but still not perfect)! You embarrass Chord Poly so hard, it's actually funny. Hilarious, in fact.

 

[Nolbert0]

Did anyone manage to rename the equlizer settings? I have differnt settings for different earphones.. and I do not find a way to remane the presets or create own ones.. I do not want to match JAZZ to Earphone 1 and Rock to earphone 2 etc...

I think you can change that when you customise the UI. Also the EQ icons as well. I remember doing it for the Shanling M2s. I changed the names of the EQ profiles to the headphone model name and changed the icon to the manufacturer logo. e.g. one of the EQ profiles was named HD380 and had the Sennheiser logo as the icon.

This was a while ago. Word of warning, M2s is also a Hiby OS so I'm taking a massive leap of assumption to 'connect these dots'. I've yet to attempt a custom UI on the R3 so I have no further info.