[subguy812]

I must be a small minority, but I still use my DD socket 1, venturecraft Jazz/Valoq and AK120. I like their sound then, and I still do now. But I do get your point.
But do bare in mind, we are not talking about through away products, we are talking about products which cost a healthy sum of money.

Recently AK stopped producing spare parts for their AK380 and SP1000. I know of a guy who had a wheel issue on his Sp2000 three times in one year. Imagine paying $4,999 USD and expecting to keep it for a lifetime and only to be told you can't repair it once you do need it.

I know they are not throw away devices. Fortunately, there is a great used market. Yes, you do lose money each time but it assists in allowing new device trials. Obviously, I hold on to review samples.

 

[Andykong]

Hello,

I am French so please excuse me in advance if I make any text errors.

I have a question for CAYIN on this forum. Indeed, I see their intervention on this forum.

And thank you to the users for their feedback on this product.

I want to buy the cayin n8ii, but reading the different opinions, I'm really starting to hesitate.

Indeed, the problems of overheating, charging, display of the real level of the battery, the box, ... are reported on the site by the users of this player.

I personally find that this is not normal for the price of this player.

Is there a design problem? If yes, will it be fixed for the next manufactured units?
Are these problems generalized on all units manufactured?
Should I wait for an update of this player to buy it?

Because if I buy this product, even if it is under warranty, it remains an important investment and I really don't want to be bothered.

Thank you in advance for your answer.
Juppiter

Thank you for your feedback and I understand your answers.

Nevertheless I buy a portable walkman and in my use even if it costs more than 3000 euros, it will be more in my pocket than on a desk.
Personally I have a cowon plenue 2 and an AK SR25. These 2 players do not heat up and can be put in my pocket without risking creating additional heating of the player. I want to buy a better portable player to make me happy and the CAYIN player was a solution for me. Unfortunately, I must have made a mistake because if I really want to use it as a portable music player, which is normally its basic objective, it won't be possible.

As specified in my previous message, I wish the opinion of CAYIN to my previous message. oT

Don’t worry, English is not my mother language either.
To avoid further confusion, let's summarize your problems into three headings

1. overheating
2. misleading battery capacity
3. the box? do you mean the leather case?

1. Overheating.

A lot of users reported that their player runs warm or hot (depends on playback condition and ventilation condition), but most of them also commented that they are expecting the N8ii to run hot given its design and specification. I didn’t encounter any OVERHEATING reports unless the user is charging and playback at the same time, and in most cases, this happens when users want to burn in their player as soon as possible. If you are not familiar with the impact of charging during playback to operation temperature, try to play a 3D game or 4K video on your mobile phone for 15 minutes and then charge it at the same time. Your mobile phone will overheat, and some of them even shut down or stop operating.

On the other hand, if you compare N8ii to your previous players that “do not heat up and can be put in my pocket without risking creating additional heating of the player”. There is a good old saying that you can eat your cake, or you can have your cake, but you cannot eat your cake and have it. Likewise, with N8ii, you can have Class A, you can have high voltage P+ mode, and you can have full balanced vacuum tube amplification, but cannot have these without additional heating. Let’s compare apple to apple. If you playback N8ii in Class AB, Solid State, P mode, it is still a very powerful DAP in the market, but it’ll stay cool and pocketable. Will it sound better than your previous player under this setting? I’ll let other users comment subjectively.

2. Misleading battery capacity

Yes, this is a bug, we have confirmed this publicly since 24 March. It takes a lot longer than anticipated because the battery capacity problem is a randomized bug; it doesn't appear according to specific steps of operations. We have run a small-scale test with several units of N8ii, trying to replicate the problem in our lab with repeated charging and discharging. We have also collected several N8ii from local users when they reported the bug to us. In all cases, the battery reading failure will only appear randomly: it can appear on one charging cycle but will resume normal operation in another charging cycle. We are still investigating the condition that triggers the bug. I just want to clarify that we do not intend to leave this bug as-is, we are working on a fix.

3. Leather case

The N8ii case is made from vegetable-tanned calfskin, at least that's what we were told by our supplier. As with all hand-made genuine leather products, dimensions might vary slightly, and it can be a good fit when brand new but stressed after daily use. We have tightened our QA standard after receiving user complaints, the recent delivery should fit better than the first batch. Someone had provided a quick fix to improve the fit (HERE and HERE) if the case is not holding the player properly.

 

[Andykong]

I think he means DAP.. Walkmans of old and not Sony Walkman specifically...

Anyway, correct me if I'm wrong but according to Korg, Nutube do not produce any heat during operation?

If I remember it right, Sony markets the wm1z and wm1z as a Walkman product

The filament of KORG Nutebe is LED-based, it won't get hot during operation. But the Nutube will draw a lot of current when compare to op-amp, so having two Nutube in the amplification circuit will generate substantial heat.

 

[AlonTZ]

I don't have a problem with the Heating of the N8, i think it is a necessity for ANY amp reach a certain Temp to operate well.

a few month ago - me and my friend conducted this test :
We took 2 Cayin Ru6 + 2 Samsung S10e + same USB-C cable.
Both set a completely identical using same UAPP, same inner files (WAV) and the phones in airplane mode no WIFI and BT.

The only difference was that 1 unit was working for 30 minutes playing music and the second one was "Cold" (not working for more than 4 hours)
So we compare the audio between the Cold and Hot unit .... the difference was HUGE !!

Same thing apply to the test in the N8 - while toggling between the different amp mode, it is not correct way to do those tests. Every amp mode need a few mints to warm up.
The best way to compare (fast) is to have 2 units at your hand ... well... "that's what friends are for... "

 

[Andykong]

I may just be the exception as opposed to the rule here, but I have never held on to any device, smartphones (probably buy 4 a year) or DAPs as to needing to worry about battery health or performance decline. Are folks actually holding on to devices for 2-4 years?

Battery care is always a problem I need to address in a DAP thread. Telling people to do and don't with Lithium batteries is harder than you can imagine. The situation is getting better after several years of hard work, but in the earlier days, I received complaints because the DAP stays at 99 battery count and won't charge to 100. I tried to explain to them that swallow charging is a better practice and they shouldn't insist on 100% charging, it just doesn't work at that time.

I have encountered users who insisted that if the batteries are not user-replaceable, they won't buy them.

Depends on the device my sp2000 is approaching 3 years now. My iPhone I swap every 2 years. I’d say my average is 2-4 years life span.

I think the biggest problem when we compare a mobile phone vs DAP on this particular issue, is that we willing to replace the battery of your mobile phone but we are reluctant to do that with DAP. I can understand the implication to users because you can replace the battery of the mobile phone from a local dealer at a fairly low cost, or you can buy the battery from the dealer and ask a technician to replace it for you. The DAP industry runs on a much smaller scale, users need to send the player back to the manufacturer when they need to replace the battery, and we can't sell the battery to our users because no flight carrier will accept an uninstalled lithium battery.

In other words, if we keep a mobile phone for 4 years, most users find it acceptable to replace the battery once or twice in between. However, if we keep a DAP for 4 years, we might still use the original battery, so battery care becomes a significant issue.

 

[Andykong]

I don't have a problem with the Heating of the N8, i think it is a necessity for ANY amp reach a certain Temp to operate well.

a few month ago - me and my friend conducted this test :
We took 2 Cayin Ru6 + 2 Samsung S10e + same USB-C cable.
Both set a completely identical using same UAPP, same inner files (WAV) and the phones in airplane mode no WIFI and BT.

The only difference was that 1 unit was working for 30 minutes playing music and the second one was "Cold" (not working for more than 4 hours)
So we compare the audio between the Cold and Hot unit .... the difference was HUGE !!

Same thing apply to the test in the N8 - while toggling between the different amp mode, it is not correct way to do those tests. Every amp mode need a few mints to warm up.
The best way to compare (fast) is to have 2 units at your hand ... well... "that's what friends are for... "

The RU6 is a special case because it is a R-2R DAC design when we design the circuit, we need to compensate for the heat issue by assuming the resistors will reach a certain degree when they operated in a stable condition.

N8ii will also have a similar problem because a large part of the analog circuit is discrete components.

 

[Andykong]

I was occupied by another N8ii feature development in the past few days, It was quite a nightmare when I read the N8ii thread this morning. My original plan was to go through all the new pages as usual, unfortunately I can only cover up to page 189.

I have planned a short trip during Easter holiday, so I'll off the grid for several days, let's see what happened what I get back from the short trip. maybe 20 pages of questions and complaints?

 

[AlonTZ]

The RU6 is a special case because it is a R-2R DAC design when we design the circuit, we need to compensate for the heat issue by assuming the resistors will reach a certain degree when they operated in a stable condition.

N8ii will also have a similar problem because a large part of the analog circuit is discrete components.

Ye i meant that the HOT unit sounded way better.

Regarding battery replacement - i know by heart all the shipping regulation as part of my business is Emergency LED lightning.

There is a way to overcome this ... and if battery replacement on DAP is not that difficult procedure i think every distributor/dealer should have a few spare ones for any case instead of sending the DAPs to the factory for battery replacement as this is supper expensive for all sides, the dealers/factory handling the shipments and for the customer is the waiting time.

 

[Quadfather]

WM1ZM2 is the only option at this quality level that you can put into your pocket

Can't get enough of my NW-WM1Z Gen 1. Someday I will own Cayin n8ii.

 

[Shawnb]

@Andykong any chance you will offer the demo case with the Velcro lid? I’d love the option to buy one.

 

[yaps66]

I was occupied by another N8ii feature development in the past few days, It was quite a nightmare when I read the N8ii thread this morning. My original plan was to go through all the new pages as usual, unfortunately I can only cover up to page 189.

I have planned a short trip during Easter holiday, so I'll off the grid for several days, let's see what happened what I get back from the short trip. maybe 20 pages of questions and complaints?

Enjoy your break Andy. You deserve it!

 

[Whitigir]

Does anyone know how to enable DAC mode on N8ii?

 

[Juppiter]

Don’t worry, English is not my mother language either.
To avoid further confusion, let's summarize your problems into three headings

1. overheating
2. misleading battery capacity
3. the box? do you mean the leather case?

1. Overheating.

A lot of users reported that their player runs warm or hot (depends on playback condition and ventilation condition), but most of them also commented that they are expecting the N8ii to run hot given its design and specification. I didn’t encounter any OVERHEATING reports unless the user is charging and playback at the same time, and in most cases, this happens when users want to burn in their player as soon as possible. If you are not familiar with the impact of charging during playback to operation temperature, try to play a 3D game or 4K video on your mobile phone for 15 minutes and then charge it at the same time. Your mobile phone will overheat, and some of them even shut down or stop operating.

On the other hand, if you compare N8ii to your previous players that “do not heat up and can be put in my pocket without risking creating additional heating of the player”. There is a good old saying that you can eat your cake, or you can have your cake, but you cannot eat your cake and have it. Likewise, with N8ii, you can have Class A, you can have high voltage P+ mode, and you can have full balanced vacuum tube amplification, but cannot have these without additional heating. Let’s compare apple to apple. If you playback N8ii in Class AB, Solid State, P mode, it is still a very powerful DAP in the market, but it’ll stay cool and pocketable. Will it sound better than your previous player under this setting? I’ll let other users comment subjectively.

2. Misleading battery capacity

Oui, c'est un bug, nous l'avons confirmé publiquement depuis le 24 mars. Cela prend beaucoup plus de temps que prévu car le problème de capacité de la batterie est un bogue aléatoire ; il n'apparaît pas selon les étapes spécifiques des opérations. Nous avons effectué un test à petite échelle avec plusieurs unités de N8ii, en essayant de reproduire le problème dans notre laboratoire avec des charges et des décharges répétées. Nous avons également collecté plusieurs N8ii auprès d'utilisateurs locaux lorsqu'ils nous ont signalé le bogue. Dans tous les cas, l'échec de lecture de la batterie n'apparaîtra que de manière aléatoire : il peut apparaître sur un cycle de charge mais reprendra un fonctionnement normal dans un autre cycle de charge. Nous enquêtons toujours sur la condition qui déclenche le bogue. Je veux juste préciser que nous n'avons pas l'intention de laisser ce bogue tel quel, nous travaillons sur un correctif.

3. Étui en cuir

The N8ii case is made from vegetable-tanned calfskin, at least that's what we were told by our supplier. As with all hand-made genuine leather products, dimensions might vary slightly, and it can be a good fit when brand new but stressed after daily use. We have tightened our QA standard after receiving user complaints, the recent delivery should fit better than the first batch. Someone had provided a quick fix to improve the fit (HERE and HERE) if the case is not holding the player properly.

Thank you for this feedback.

 

[AlonTZ]

Does anyone know how to enable DAC mode on N8ii?

When u connect the USB wire , drop down the drop menu and the lower section say " USB charge" , tap on it and a new will be open to chose the USB DAC.

 

[Whitigir]

When u connect the USB wire , drop down the drop menu and the lower section say " USB charge" , tap on it and a new will be open to chose the USB DAC.

Oh my ghost, thank you! I was foolishly hunting for it in the Cayin Apps ....because my Ibasso has that in the Ibasso music app settings LOL! <== still a very newb Cayin user