Cayin N5iiS Android Based Master Quality Digital Audio Player

First, this thing sounds incredible, and is very powerful. It's dynamic and clean with detail and clarity I've never heard in another player since the Qp1r. A similar sound, but less clinical sounding than the Qp1r. It has a rare 2 card slots, and a good 64gb of internal memory. Once the price of 512 gb cards comes down, I'll have a whole terabyte of music on this thing easily. It takes my 400gb cards now with no problem. The screen is beautiful, the battery life is above average and the build quality is sensational. Yes, this thing is absolutely gorgeous. Checks all boxes. Enjoy

This is the best portable audio player I've tried (of only a few), and is still infuriating to use. I feel like I should give it fewer than 3 stars for utterly failing to be what it needs to be. But it's better than some other options I've tried, so I'm conflicted. It being "relative best" won't keep me from driving a nail through it, once I find its replacement.At best, it was always hard to use in car and impossible on bike, now I just can't on either (charge/battery issues). Even in a usable environment, I have to stop everything for minutes to find music to play (bad playlist support, limited and proprietary player, meh UI requires hyper-focus and child-hands, limited browse/search ability).BIGGEST PROBLEM: If you "allow" it to discharge fully, it will not start again until it takes some charge. When I bought it, this meant 30 minutes with ideal charging. 6 months later it's at least an hour, or 2 hours in my car. I use quotes around "allow" because this device will actively work against every effort you make to charge it.The car usage is particularly frustrating, and such a requirement for this device, I can't just stop the car and get out, I have to stop the unit, or it will discharge as long as I'm out of the car. OK, makes sense. But even when I stop the unit, if it sits on idle for a couple days, it goes dead. You can set it to auto-off on idle, so OK, I can live with that, too. But once it's off, it will take a few minutes - A FEW MINUTES - to start up again when I get back in the car. Not OK, but I can still live with that, I'll just leave it plugged in on USB charging permanently and not use auto-off. No. Hahah, FU, No. Because the USB cable is not secure, regardless of how many cables I try. Even when I check the cable every time I start driving, I'm surprised an hour into the drive when it shuts off anyway. Once that happens I can't use the device for the next 2 hours, and that's if I do a good job of checking the USB connection like a tweaker.I'm considering opening up the bottom and permanently soldering a cable to replace the jack, with the expectation that I'll lose 10 hours, with a 50% chance of killing the patient. I kind of hope I do.OK, more fails, and a couple redemptions:PROS:- Storage capacity- 2-cards storage: I use this a lot, not for capacity but for management- android-based- great sound- physical UI much better than other popular playersCONS:- Not enough CPU to play flacs on VLC - it runs, but every song trips at start, may hang intermittently, and high-res flacs will choke continually- Native player UI sucks. Unintuitive navigation traps will make you crash your car- Does not accept any open or known-standard playlists- Device-made playlists, via crappy UI; Or proprietary-format, side-band-loaded jankery. What's your favorite scripting language?- (VLC supports standard lists, but see above...)- Settings distributed around system, hard to find, unintuitive- UI: tiny buttons and text, not for adult fingers or lives, requires 100% focus and stability- Screen sometimes responded to "ghost touches": sitting face-up on the table it randomly responds to touches which don't happen.- Headphone jack in top, USB in bottom, no end to stand on, must lay on side or face-up, or not chargeMORE CONS - THIS PLAYER WANTS TO DIE:- No reasonable power-usage modes, always found myself with a dead unit.- Pause-on-disconnect doesn't work, must pay attention that device is paused or turned off every time you stop using- Rapidly and steadily declining battery life since purchase. Now I only use with power connected, but...- Badly-built USB connector - my plugs must be forced in then gently placed on table/seat to charge. In car it will charge for a few minutes before it disconnects itself.- Startup takes minutes.- After draining, must charge for hours before it will start again.- Typical USB charger problems: Some chargers take a couple hours to fully charge, but many don't even keep up with discharge during use.- May drop from 15% to dead in a moment- No way to configure alert when charger connected / disconnected, or when near dead.

A true music player. It is not very pretty but its PCB and all of its high end IC's, storage capacity and streaming capabilities were a huge sell for me. I coupled it to an amp to help the streaming output. I'm thankful that people like high end sound enough to make this.. I'm happy😊

Bought the Cayin N5iiS in Dec. of 2018. Now it is July 25th 2019, and it has totally stopped working. For the last month I've had to repeatedly reboot it to get it started, sometimes 3 or 4 times. Now it is completely unresponsive. Dead. Cayin's support is a nightmare. Regret not ordering another brand.