HiBy R5 Gen 2 Review

User Experience

The HiBy R5 features HiBy’s OS, based on Android 8.1. This version of Android is a bit dated, to be honest, but it’s nothing to worry about. I don’t personally expect any DAP to perform or feel like a smartphone. Sound is ultimately what matters.

Sound-wise, there is the HiByOS. It’s a custom Android rebuilt and in-house developed by HiBy, optimized for bit-perfect audio, and completely bypasses the Android’s limitations and SRC thanks to their Direct Transport Audio Architecture. Of course, this means that any app that you could go for would benefit from the integrated DACs to the full extent.

HiBy combined the SD425 with 2 gigabytes of RAM, which is just enough for a DAP. I haven’t had any stutters or freezes during my time with it. It is reasonably fluid and quick overall. Another cool thing is that you can see the sample rate on the right side of the notification bar which stays on top at all times. The LED light just below the power button lights up in one particular colour, depending on the sample rate, accordingly.

The streaming apps work like charm with bit-perfect playback. Again, the device is quite quick, including the booting time. I also found the battery life to be very very good. You can easily feel the maturity in design, software, and user experience of the new R5.

HiBy Music App

For playing songs in your archive, there’s the HiBy Music application. There aren’t any real flaws I faced in this app as it works perfectly. One thing I liked is the screen that contains your recently played songs. That way I can always return to the songs I play frequently. It’s also a very feature-packed application.

A nice feature is the WiFi music importing menu. When your PC or smartphone is connected to the same WiFi network, you can transfer your music files over the air once you copy the given URL onto your browser. I’m not quite sure if this is feasible for you since a wired transfer is quite faster. Yet it’s a very nice addition regardless.

Reaching out to your folders, artists and even genres is very easy from the main screen. The HiBy Link option is also available again from the app. It also supports searching and that is quite important for many people.

I loved the simplistic approach in the app with a nice layout and menu placements. A theme option could be nice to customize but it’s still very good and simple to the eye. To cut the story short, the HiBy Music app has everything you can need in a portable player.

MSEB

There’s an MSEB menu inside the HiBy Music application which stands for “MageSound 8-Ball”. This menu works for altering the sound next to the basic 10-band equalizer and it’s a trademark from HiBy. Through that screen, you can adjust almost every aspect of sound you can imagine. And the most beautiful part is that they work.

What you can do is adjust the overall temperature of sound from cold to warm, bass extension from light to deep, bass texture, note thickness, vocals, sibilance, air, and so on… This is incredible to play with. With this feature, you can make every type of headphone work with this DAP.

But pure sound lovers like me probably won’t use the features and simply leave it all closed. In my case, I only use the EQ to some extent with my IEMs, and I think those DSP settings are not fully natural sounding but it’s great to have this much detail in terms of sound effects. So I congratulate the effort. The people who fancy these kinds of DSP features most likely will fall in love with the device.

Even though I don’t like playing around with DSP settings, this has to be mentioned as being another important aspect of HiBy players. Overall the software is excellent and you can use the HiBy Music app with your own devices from other brands as well. Give it a try.

Page 1 – Intro, Package, Design & Build

Page 3 – Sound Quality

Page 4 – Comparison & Conclusion