German user here. I pre-ordered on Sep. 9th. The order was shipped on 19th and arrived 11 days later (30th). I paid 159 € and so far I wasn‘t charged for import tax. I would estimate these to be around 35 € from experience, but sometimes the invoice doesn‘t come, so here‘s hoping.
Either way, the Hiby R3 II is a fairly inexpensive DAP. But the main question is: Why would one need a PMP in 2023? For me, the reason would be to fight streaming and „own“ / collect digital music and maintain a superior library. For me, that also means that I analyze all my files and if I see there‘s nothing but noise in my 96 kHz file, I will downsample it. Conversions are always adjusted to TPL. There is no crap in my library, all files tagged with album artist, proper artist names (instead of „feat.“ on a song title), album cover, ratings, album info in the lyrics, and so forth…
All my music is stored on a single microSD card (and after a bad experience also occasionally backed up in iCloud). This SD card is usually in the back of my iMac but I appreciate the convenience to pop it into a DAP, the Chord 2Go or Poly, etc.
I haven‘t tried mounting the SD card through the R3 II yet, but I am expecting it‘ll work no problem. So I can simply change my desktop / JRiver library to the drive and play music from there. At least that is the plan…
So let me reflect a bit. I have a Hugo 2, Mojo 2, TempoTec BHD Pro and a bunch more dongles in the drawer. Excellent portable devices with one issue: They need a source. So the PMP needs to become my single source for anything but streaming. But boy, oh boy, have I been let down.
Browsing music on the Hiby R3 II is so bad. Like really bad.
1. Selecting an Artist will get you to Albums. But if your Album has different Artists, for example a Classical album that has instrumental tracks and a choir, or a Piano solo as well as an orchestra, this Album will be separated as long as it is tagged correctly. Compilations need to have Various Artists in the Artist tag or they will be separated!
2. Album Artist should be showing the albums, but it is not. ALBUM Artist will get you to the songs instead of albums. This does not make sense at all!
3. Album sort is also messed up. I doubt most people will be able to remember all album names in their collection so I was quite bummed that the small display wastes so much space when clearly there should be a 2nd line mentioning the album artist below album title. But Hiby does not - because it doesn‘t even check! It will throw all tracks together from the same album name - another huge oversight. So the album „The Köln Concert“ throws together Chet Baker and Keith Jarrett, two completely different albums.
4. It seems like the R3 II does not create thumbnails. Every time you want to browse albums, it has to reload the cover art. The majority will never load at all and even when playing, some art isn‘t displayed even when triple-checked and confirmed on the computer. And even when it loads, the scrolling is very choppy on a low-res display.
The only proper way to browse the music library is via Files. This is so sad and ridiculous at the same time. The main objective of a DAP failed, at least to my expectations explained in the beginning. I don‘t need Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, that is a nice-to-have feature at best. The main purpose is to carry my library with me with an enjoyable way of accessing it.
I had far better browsing experiences on an iPhone 3G in 2009. In fact, even iTunes does a better job so my recommendation would be to save the money and size up on smartphone storage. What use is a new DAP every 3 months with latest DAC and new amp when you can‘t get the basics right? I don‘t think my criticism is exclusive to Hiby, but I really think manufacturers need to go back to the drawing board or nobody will care if the product category dies in a few years.
I can agree with you that the UI is uncomfortable to navigate. I find it hard to get around to the places that I want to get to, as well. But, I think that maybe some tweaks to the firmware might make some of those complaints dissipate. Give it some time. I have to say after a week of listening to the new R3 II, I'm pretty impressed by the sound. It's more nuanced and natural sounding than the R3 Sabre. I can finally say that I have a small dap that I am happy with the sound and operations (although could be improved) for walking around and travel that I wouldn't be missing good quality sound. Pretty impressive for little money.
I can agree with you that the UI is uncomfortable to navigate. I find it hard to get around to the places that I want to get to, as well. But, I think that maybe some tweaks to the firmware might make some of those complaints dissipate. Give it some time. I have to say after a week of listening to the new R3 II, I'm pretty impressed by the sound. It's more nuanced and natural sounding than the R3 Sabre. I can finally say that I have a small dap that I am happy with the sound and operations (although could be improved) for walking around and travel that I wouldn't be missing good quality sound. Pretty impressive for little money.
And after messing around with Mage 8 Ball it sounds even better. Browsing through tracks. I hope users are using the side pane for alphabetical, for quicker browsing
German user here. I pre-ordered on Sep. 9th. The order was shipped on 19th and arrived 11 days later (30th). I paid 159 € and so far I wasn‘t charged for import tax. I would estimate these to be around 35 € from experience, but sometimes the invoice doesn‘t come, so here‘s hoping.
Either way, the Hiby R3 II is a fairly inexpensive DAP. But the main question is: Why would one need a PMP in 2023? For me, the reason would be to fight streaming and „own“ / collect digital music and maintain a superior library. For me, that also means that I analyze all my files and if I see there‘s nothing but noise in my 96 kHz file, I will downsample it. Conversions are always adjusted to TPL. There is no crap in my library, all files tagged with album artist, proper artist names (instead of „feat.“ on a song title), album cover, ratings, album info in the lyrics, and so forth…
All my music is stored on a single microSD card (and after a bad experience also occasionally backed up in iCloud). This SD card is usually in the back of my iMac but I appreciate the convenience to pop it into a DAP, the Chord 2Go or Poly, etc.
I haven‘t tried mounting the SD card through the R3 II yet, but I am expecting it‘ll work no problem. So I can simply change my desktop / JRiver library to the drive and play music from there. At least that is the plan…
So let me reflect a bit. I have a Hugo 2, Mojo 2, TempoTec BHD Pro and a bunch more dongles in the drawer. Excellent portable devices with one issue: They need a source. So the PMP needs to become my single source for anything but streaming. But boy, oh boy, have I been let down.
Browsing music on the Hiby R3 II is so bad. Like really bad.
1. Selecting an Artist will get you to Albums. But if your Album has different Artists, for example a Classical album that has instrumental tracks and a choir, or a Piano solo as well as an orchestra, this Album will be separated as long as it is tagged correctly. Compilations need to have Various Artists in the Artist tag or they will be separated!
2. Album Artist should be showing the albums, but it is not. ALBUM Artist will get you to the songs instead of albums. This does not make sense at all!
3. Album sort is also messed up. I doubt most people will be able to remember all album names in their collection so I was quite bummed that the small display wastes so much space when clearly there should be a 2nd line mentioning the album artist below album title. But Hiby does not - because it doesn‘t even check! It will throw all tracks together from the same album name - another huge oversight. So the album „The Köln Concert“ throws together Chet Baker and Keith Jarrett, two completely different albums.
4. It seems like the R3 II does not create thumbnails. Every time you want to browse albums, it has to reload the cover art. The majority will never load at all and even when playing, some art isn‘t displayed even when triple-checked and confirmed on the computer. And even when it loads, the scrolling is very choppy on a low-res display.
The only proper way to browse the music library is via Files. This is so sad and ridiculous at the same time. The main objective of a DAP failed, at least to my expectations explained in the beginning. I don‘t need Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, that is a nice-to-have feature at best. The main purpose is to carry my library with me with an enjoyable way of accessing it.
I had far better browsing experiences on an iPhone 3G in 2009. In fact, even iTunes does a better job so my recommendation would be to save the money and size up on smartphone storage. What use is a new DAP every 3 months with latest DAC and new amp when you can‘t get the basics right? I don‘t think my criticism is exclusive to Hiby, but I really think manufacturers need to go back to the drawing board or nobody will care if the product category dies in a few years.
Sadly the album art loading is an issue in most of DAPs which I had.
DAP is nice as a small portable device to separate music from the smartphone. At least I prefer to have a music separately without any cable from my smartphone when I use it.
However, I ended with LG V30 - for most of the cases the quality is more that enough and the smoothness of usage beats almost every DAP on the market.
The only drawback is lack of BT receiver function, but I have an Android and WiFi - I can stream without the smartphone.
Hope that the issues mentioned by you will be fixed in FW update. I had R3 Pro (original, not ESS) and it is a lovely, nice, small DAP. I had some hopes looking at R3 MKII, but I think I will stick with second smartphone as DAP only, at least for now.
Browsing music on the Hiby R3 II is so bad. Like really bad.
1. Selecting an Artist will get you to Albums. But if your Album has different Artists, for example a Classical album that has instrumental tracks and a choir, or a Piano solo as well as an orchestra, this Album will be separated as long as it is tagged correctly. Compilations need to have Various Artists in the Artist tag or they will be separated!
2. Album Artist should be showing the albums, but it is not. ALBUM Artist will get you to the songs instead of albums. This does not make sense at all!
3. Album sort is also messed up. I doubt most people will be able to remember all album names in their collection so I was quite bummed that the small display wastes so much space when clearly there should be a 2nd line mentioning the album artist below album title. But Hiby does not - because it doesn‘t even check! It will throw all tracks together from the same album name - another huge oversight. So the album „The Köln Concert“ throws together Chet Baker and Keith Jarrett, two completely different albums.
4. It seems like the R3 II does not create thumbnails. Every time you want to browse albums, it has to reload the cover art. The majority will never load at all and even when playing, some art isn‘t displayed even when triple-checked and confirmed on the computer. And even when it loads, the scrolling is very choppy on a low-res display.
The only proper way to browse the music library is via Files. This is so sad and ridiculous at the same time. The main objective of a DAP failed, at least to my expectations explained in the beginning. I don‘t need Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, that is a nice-to-have feature at best. The main purpose is to carry my library with me with an enjoyable way of accessing it.
I had far better browsing experiences on an iPhone 3G in 2009. In fact, even iTunes does a better job so my recommendation would be to save the money and size up on smartphone storage. What use is a new DAP every 3 months with latest DAC and new amp when you can‘t get the basics right? I don‘t think my criticism is exclusive to Hiby, but I really think manufacturers need to go back to the drawing board or nobody will care if the product category dies in a few years.
It seems like Artist and Album Artist are reversed in the software vs how it traditionally is meant to be. Once you know this, it makes more sense to use, but yea that is a bug or translation issue.
My fav offline DAP is the Lotoo PAW 6000/Gold Touch. They are made really well and sound fantastic.
I messed with the MSEB and tweak my sound. Good stuff. As far as album art 🖼I agree with you. I ask @HiByMusic if they can make album art bigger See what happens. @Joe Bloggs
It does take up the full height or width of the available space so it's a matter of expanding to cover the full height AND width and cropping out the parts that stick out, is it?
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It does take up the full height or width of the available space so it's a matter of expanding to cover the full height AND width and cropping out the parts that stick out, is it?
Unfortunately the R3 II is full of bugs (playback view does not update sometimes when FWD/REV physical button is pressed with screen off, sometimes it forgets the playlist it was playing even throughout the album and many many more). Nothing deal breaking, but I really wish @HiByMusic would release some patch soon.
But today was one of the most ridiculous when I wanted to transfer the music via WiFi.
The address just cuts 3 digits short and now I need do guess the full IP. Only 1000 tries to get it right
I luckily have old R3 Saber which uses almost the same port number for WiFi connection (..62:4xxx instead of ..136:4xxx), but well, I could have been a new hiby DAP user
Taking USB Type-C and going from the R3 II to the Shanling UA3 once again provided a workable route, except totally not ever needed as the R3 II sounds more clear and up-front than the UA3?
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