HiBy R1 HiFi MP3 Player with Bluetooth 5.1 Tidal Qobuz DSD PCM Lossless Music Player with Touchscreen/Hi Res Audio Certified/MSEB Tuning/2TB Expanded Memory

I am by no means an audiophile. I just want something portable that carries my music and sounds good. I had a Sandisk Clip+ and it was decent for a long time until the battery. I looked at a lot of other cheap DAPs but none of them looked good. So I descended the DAP rabbit hole and I was honestly surprised at how advanced and ming numbingly expensive they get. After a lot of back and forth I figured that Hiby was probably best for my needs and the R1 was entry level but still offered the quality I'm looking for.I'm very happy with my choice. First, it's very well made. The back and front are glass and the edge is a really pleasing clear plastic. It definitely doesn't feel cheap. It's small enough to be comfortably held in my palm, light but still has a reassuring weight to it. Buttons feel good and responsive.The display is crisp and clean, perfect for good looking album covers and an easy to read and use player interface. Everything loads up quickly enough. I mean there is a slight delay loading album images but I think that's got more to do with the size of the images I was using. I dropped everything to 800px and it's definitely faster to load.The menus and UI are intuitive and easy to navigate. It has a plethora of settings to customise. From the actual function to personalising playback. You have things like gapless and crossfade but the winner for me is MSEB. There is the usual EQ you'd expect but MSEB is just so much better to me. It just feels more intuitive and user friendly. I looked for some recommended MSEB settings online and tweaked it to my preference. The result is some beautiful sounding music across genres. It's like I'm hearing some of these tracks for the first time. The sound signature is gorgeous.I didn't think I'd use the soundstage slider but just opening it a little makes everything just sound more open and immersive.I haven't tried bluetooth because if I'm using a lossless player and made the effort to load lossless music I'm really not going to nuke that with Bluetooth. That's not to say I'll never use it. I'm sure there will be times that the convenience of using a BT speaker or headphones will be great. But for the rest of the time I'm using IEMs and that's really where I hear the quality of this player.Scanning the database for changes is reasonably fast and it scanned 6000 tracks in a couple of minutes. I really appreciate the sorting options available. You can find music by all tracks, artist, album or genre. You can search (although it took some getting used to the old cellphone style keyboard. Not a big deal though. I don't search enough to be any issue). You can also slide down the right side and scroll by letter. So this player really does make it convenient to navigate your collection and find your music.You can favorite tracks and there's a menu for favorites, recents, playlists, recently added or most played. Which I think is really great and those are common ways I tend to look for music in things like streaming apps. I haven't created any playlists yet but I'll likely build some mood based playlists over time.I haven't really tested the life of the battery but it does charge really quick on my PD charger and based on what I've seen so far I have no trouble believing it'll hit the quoted number and maybe more.Overall this has all the options I could need with nothing I don't. All in a high quality, compact device that plays some excellent sounding music.

Works great, ear buds have good sound quality. Easy to use and durable.

Size is very practical but the quality overall is terrible. It takes multiple touchs to get a command volume needs to be configured twice. Shuffle will not browse all the songs, every time you turn it off it loses ALL configurations including Bluetooth pairing. Menu in general doesn't make sense and is an Odyssey to find a seamless way to hit play. This is definitely not for me 1/10 wouldn't recommend

so far i love this device i listened to a friends sony wch 520 and skullcandy hesh evo headphones for about an hour with no drop of connection the eq and mseb make a big difference but you cant use the mseb with the sonys, i did not have to disable the volume lock and was able to update to the latest firmware via sd card from the hiby website, i have over 5,000 songs and so far everything is going great, and the player sounds amazing even with some less than 20 $ headphones with adjustments to the eq and mseb i saw a review that said it had a speaker and this is not true it is lightweight and fits in the palm of your hand but feels nice, EDIT: to get the mseb and eq screen to go back you have to carefully press the back arrow, not the letters next to it, it works perfectly. its awesome especially for the price. i found that with the pull down shortcut menu if you tap the top of the screen once then do it it works better. and the screen resolution is also great and sharp. i love this player

This unit has a lot of potential; it’s a nice little digital music player.Positives: No built in storage at all. This reduces the cost of the player, and lets you get exactly the size of Micro SD card you want.Several different methods of loading your music files into the unit. Easiest: Connect the USB cable to your computer and drag & drop files or folders into the Micro SD card window. You can also connect to your computer via WiFi and load your files that way. This is a bit more tedious, because you can’t grab whole folders, only single song files or groups.Built in WiFi is useful, but entering a password is very tedious because it uses the old cell phone method of entering letters and numbers abc, def, ghi, etc. This needs to be fixed.Built in Bluetooth pairs reasonably easily and works well with Bluetooth headphones or speakers.You can set up your own playlists, but this is also pretty tedious, because you can only select one song and add it to a new playlist or one already created; no way to select a group of songs or whole albums.- - - - -UPDATE: 3/16/2025 - I have found, completely by accident, how to add an entire album to a playlist: 1. Choose an album, or first choose an artist, and then an album. 2. Tap on the album title to open it and show the list of songs. 3. Tap and HOLD one of the song titles; you will now see selector “buttons” to the left of each song title, and commands across the top: SELECT ALL ADD DELETE CANCEL 4. Tap SELECT ALL; you will see the buttons for all the songs are highlighted. 5. Tap ADD, which will take you to the Playlist menu, where you can add the selected songs to an existing playlist or create a new one.As I discover other features, I will add them to this review.- - - - -My one BIG NEGATIVE: NO MANUAL. EVERYTHING I have figured out about this thing has been by trial and error. Sometimes it’s self explanatory, but some symbols/icons and menu options, I have no idea what they’re for.I had to do one firmware update, and the built in WiFi made it very easy, but this appears to mean that the R1’s system is still being worked on and updated, so I can see why there’s no paper manual, but… HIBY ought to provide an updatable and searchable online manual. There are several video tutorials available, but I don’t feel like sitting through a half hour video which may or may not give me the bit of information I’m looking for. The lack of a good, clear, indexed manual is my single biggest complaint about this device.So… I’m quite happy with the R1 so far, and apologies to HIBY for only 3 stars, but as soon as a searchable indexed manual which clearly outlines all the capabilities and features is made available, I will change this rating to 5 stars.