Introduction: Hiby Music, a company that for years has been designing a music player app for phones and a full player platform for DAPs, one day decided that it would breach the software-hardware demarcations and build its own music player, this project is 2 years in the making and is now about done with the crowd funding campaign and is almost ready to take the world by storm. This is the Hiby R6, “The Most Advanced Android Hi-Fi Player” let’s see what Hiby has managed to bring to the table with their first offering that is served right in the "sweet spot" of the mid range market at $569 for aluminum and $649 for the Stainless Steel.
Specifications:
Dual ESS ES9028Q2M DACs
Dual OPA1612 and Dual TPA6120 Amps
32-bit/384kHz format support & Native DSD
Snapdragon 425 Processor (4x1.4gHz)
3GB RAM (DDR3) and 32GB Storage
Expandable for up to 2TB (tested on 400GB)
Dual-Band Wifi (2.4G/5G)
Bluetooth 4.0 with apt-X
Android 6.0 (Marshmallow)
DTA (Direct Transport Architecture)
Bit-perfect output (bypassing Android SRC)
4.2 inch 300dpi 768X1280 Touchscreen
Arc-shaped 316L High-impact Stainless Steel CNC Body
Supports Line out and coaxial digital output
4000Mah Battery (with 12 hour battery life)
3.5mm, 2.5mm and line-out/coax outputs
USB-C with Quick Charge 3.0
USB DAC functionality and transport
Packaging: The Hiby R6 comes in a black cardboard box reminiscent of boxes for most modern mobile phones. The box is sturdy with the Hiby logo embossed on the front and the R6 specifications printed on in the back. Opening the box reveals the player packaged in soft plastic in a foam carrier, and underneath it you would find the rest of the accessories, and literature like instruction manual and warranty card. Everything is packaged nicely and most of the things are wrapped in soft plastic to avoid scuffs or scratches in transport.
Accessories: The base R6 has a few basic bundled items, a pin ejector for the Micro SD card, a USB A to USB C charging cable, the cable is black and sheathed in fabric but remains pliable and the connectors are quite sturdy, a line out cable, thicker but like the USB cable it’s sheathed in fabric and retains a nice flexibility with quality connectors. There are also 2 screen protectors one is tempered glass and the other is standard plastic, though Hiby says the R6 comes pre-applied with a screen protector at the factory, so you have 2 spares. Finally, there is a simple jelly style silicone case that while simple fits the unit well and does its job in protecting the player from scuffs and scratches; though a leather case is available as an add on option. Something to note though is that due to the curved nature of the screen borders the screen protectors will never fill the glass front completely.
Build Quality: I chose the grey aluminum variant as I preferred aluminums light weight over stainless steel. The R6 body is the familiar glass-metal-glass sandwich that has become the norm for mobile phones in the last few years, albeit a little thicker. The front houses a 4.2-inch 1280 x 768 screen, topped of with 2.5D curved glass and minimal bezels. Right underneath the screen is an aluminum chin with the Hiby logo and a Hi-Res sticker. Moving on the sides of the unit we have 3 ports on the top, a 3.5mm line out port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a 2.5mm 4 pole balanced port. On the left-hand side, we have 2 volume buttons and the location of the lone Micro SD slot. On the right is where you will find the power button and status LED, forward backward and play-pause buttons as well. Finally, on the bottom you will find the USB C port. On the back is a full black backed glass panel with the Hiby logo and device information, much like most phones you’d see today.
Build quality of the R6 spans from good to great, where the front and back glass meet the chassis you will find close to no gaps and smooth transition and curves at the corners of the screen. The main part of the chassis sports smooth aluminum machining highlighted especially in the top and bottom areas where the aluminum body curves inward to give some relief space for the ports and the port cutouts themselves showing very smooth cutouts for both the USB and analogue ports. The buttons all feel good with nice tactile feedback though the buttons have slight wobble in their default position.
Screen: The Hiby R6’s 4.2inch screen is quite simply a delight. At its size and resolution, it hits the ~300DPI sweet spot for most handheld devices for a smooth viewing experience. Resolution however is only one part of the story, the screen boasts wonderful color response, and black levels leading it to being one of the best screens on a DAP I have seen, even more so in this price range, rivaled only by the Pioneer/Onkyo DAPs. There isn’t much backlight bleed to speak of, and while it only has average peak brightness it manages good sunlight legibility and fantastic color visuals, although it has a slight warm cast. This high-quality screen renders album art and the navigation beautifully and, in a pinch, will do perfectly fine for watching streamed video so long as the size is no issue.
UI: One of the biggest selling points of the Hiby R6 was both it’s Snapdragon 425 SoC and the 3GB of ram it has packed in. That combo and the software work Hiby has done under the hood has lead to the absolute smoothest UI I have ever used in an Android DAP. Navigation through the familiar android UI is effortless, lag and stutter free in almost all regular usage scenarios whether it is swiping through menus and screens, switching apps, or pulling down the main tray. It can also handle the bevy of day to day apps we can use from social media like Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Spotify it handles them with relative ease even with multiple aps running multitasked. All told the Hiby boasts performance that while not on par with 2018 flagship phones which cost nearly double its price, it’s still miles ahead other DAPs and should be the benchmark for mid and high-end DAPs from here on out.
Android Implementation: Hiby decided to go with an open Android 6 implementation on the R6 this giving user the ability to access the Google Play Store and the opportunity to download each and every app under the sun without the need to sideload apps and offering that extra bit of security getting your APKs from a more trusted source entail. There are other DAPs that do this however, so what sets the R6 apart is what Hiby calls DTA or Direct Transport Audio, the reason being that Android natively has what is called SRC or Sample Rate Conversion, essentially this means that audio coming out of an Android device gets resampled to 48kHz, either resampling 44.1kHz audio or downsampling higher sample rates, so this renders open Android platforms moot right?
Hiby Music App: The stock audio player pre-installed with the R6 is feature rich, with some features being unique to the R6, while suffering from certain bugs that while not something rendering the app unusable is present enough to take note of. First let’s talk about the basic features, the Hiby Music app has the usual selection of sorting via song title, memory folder, album, artist, as well as genre, these are all about as expected though when using the artist tab, it’s noteworthy that you always default to alphabetical list of all the songs, an option to default to the album selection within the artist would be nice. Once you’re playing music you get a nice screen with the album art, the forward and back, play pause, and the Hiby special circular progress bar. Aside from that the song info is displayed, shuffle and repeat options shown and an option to pull a quick tab for the rest of the songs in the playlist. Swiping to the right once brings you a lyric pane and twice a full file info pane, there is also a 10-band equalizer with the usual presets.
Sound: The sound of the Hiby R6 has a duality in it. I’ll discuss more about on it below, but a short version is that due to the relatively high output impedance the R6 has, devices sensitive to this will have an altered sound, usually a reduction in the bass region making the overall signature of IEMs seem brighter.
To get the best idea of the sound I tested the R6 with multiple IEMs ranging from the iBasso IT01 to the Campfire Audio Andromeda and HiFiMan HE-400i among others. The testing was done volume matched to within as close as tolerances allow. The base tonality of the R6 skews slightly on the warm sound, but nothing drastic, a slight boost in low end at most.
The slight warmth lends to a full sounding bass response with impressive extension and a texture that tends to bring out “emotion” in music all the while not losing out in resolution as some players do. This full-bodied approach is carried over into the mids, again with a little emphasis so that vocals in particular won’t sound anemic or dry. Again, seemingly recurring theme with the R6. The tonality is bookended by what is by and large neutral treble that doesn’t accentuate harshness in what you’re listening to. Staging on the R6 is impressive providing good width that has a little more edge in depth, though not disproportionately so, and neither having an artificial feeling, giving a natural and accurate perception with regards to imaging when listening to music.
Technical aspects are good with the R6 showing quite capable of proper detail retrieval and not having any frequency range losing resolution. Amplification wise the R6 packs in 120mW and 300mW of power on unbalanced and balanced respectively, more than enough to run IEMs and proving capable of powering headphones that are moderately power hungry. The background is very dark, providing no hiss on almost every test situation especially when Wifi was turned off, so even sensitive gear is right at home noise wise.
Now let’s talk output impedance shall we. The R6 packs 10 ohms, that’s a pretty high number especially these days. So why does it matter? It’s because of the interaction between the input impedance (IEMs/headphones) and output impedance (amp/DAP), because frequency response changes occur when the output impedance is close to the input impedance. So naturally we’d want higher impedance gear to pair with the R6 so that the attenuation of bass doesn’t happen, so why then does other gear not seem to be impacted the same way? Because the impedance of earphones is not actually fixed but varies throughout the frequency curve and because, and especially with multi driver the impedance curve is different for every IEM.
Single drivers, dynamics in particular usually have more linear impedance responses therefore is more uniformly affected by the R6, and if they’re all affected the same it balances it out. But once you add more drivers, the more sensitive multi-BA style it gets tricky because every driver could have different impedance ratings and now a change in one drivers output can greatly affect how you hear the signature. So, it’s a lot of uncertainty out of the box. A simple, but not free solution is to buy an IEMatch from ifi it’s a dongle that works well and essentially eliminates all the issues related to the output impedance of the R6. Generally, it will bring back the signature of whatever affected gear you are listening to, and if you are one of those who have many multi BA IEMs it will be your best buddy.
Conclusion: The Hiby R6 has a lot going for it. It has a great price, great form factor, great screen, great UI and usability, great sound, even some great secret sauce with the DTA and the MSEB. It has a lot of great things working for it but is marred by some software issues within the app, that with proper support will be patched sooner rather than later, and a hardware design choice that adds an extra step than you need to for it to be fully flexible, something that no amount of software updates will fix. However overall, it’s a device that checks a lot of boxes and falls short in others.
But at the price it was offered up for on Indiegogo at somewhere between $400 to $500 depending on the variant and how early of a backer you were it really is hard to beat. But with the $569 and $649 at retail, you understand that you aren’t getting a top of the line device, yet it has a combined feature set and sound that can go toe-to-toe or even beat some of the pricier options in the market and essentially beats everything else around or below it as an overall package. So is the Hiby R6 perfect? A world beater? No. But it sure is a winner, and other DAP manufacturers could learn a thing or two from the R6. It's definitely worth the money and I can't wait for the next thing Hiby has brewing.
No comments:
Post a Comment