R4 mp3 & mp4 Players spotify Player with Bluetooth and WiFi 4-Way HiFi DAP Android 12 OS 3.5mm po+4.4mm bal 32G+2TB Scalable Memory

I bought this principally because I was going to have a time in hospital where wireless earphones would be impractical due to their limited battery life. the HyBy filled the brief having excellent battery life and provision for charging through USB as it plays. However, it was an excellent buy in so many other ways. It has no right to be so well built or sound so good for the money. It is significantly better than my 4-year-old IFI Hip Dac, Which is just a DAC. With all its many streaming features, the HyBy cost only slightly more! It uses Android, so one can use whatever apps you like, but the HyBy Music Player also has a 'Pure Mode' which bypasses the limitations for playing back high-res music built into Android. One can access. For example, one can access QOBUZ this way and it sounds excellent. There are also various equaliser options. There is a fancy custom one - I have forgotten the name of - which degrades the sound to my ears, but the parametric equaliser works excellently and has enabled me to tune the sound to my hearing and headphones very precisely. The headphone amplifier which can be used either single-endedly or in balanced form is surprisingly powerful and very good at conveying the dynamics of music. Although they are not an especially difficult load compared with some others, my £450 or so Grado RX2x headphones were driven well enough to give of the considerable best. The sound has very neutral tonality, very good dynamics as noted, and has a surprising amount of 'space' around it though this aspect of the sound is bettered when using the same headphones through my very much more expensive HiFi DAC and valve headphone amplifier. What is more the HyBy is not a bad streaming transport when used with the HiFi separates' DAC. It's even better when fed through my inexpensive SMSL gizmo which cleans up the signal using a better digital clock. All in all, quite a bargain!

I have a Fiio M11S that I manged to bounce off the foot of my chair and crack the screen. I sent that to China for repair and sat without a music player. Then I bought an M300 which couldn't drive my cans. I sold that and bought this. It is good. It is also nicely styled IMO. I bought a separate strap which is also v good. The MSEB equaliser is beyond me but is very capable. It sounds quite neutral and I can't quite get the bass to where I like it. I would recommend it but...my music is on a separate sd card for convenience although I write to it though usb typically. From fiio to hiby no issue. From hiby to fiio however there appears to be some incompatibility in file format. Even though they look the same, neither the fiio nor my laptop can see anything written to the sd card whilst it was mounted in the R4. I had to delete the files in the R4 then rewrite the to the sd card from my laptop. So. Yeah. That's a thing.

Great DAP with a nice sound (I typically play around the 35 volume level) and has enough processing power to play streaming audio unlike the R5 which will give up. My only complaint is how warm the device gets to the point where I avoid using the balanced output. Single ended seems okay though. Shorter battery life compared to the R5 but good enough. It's an Android device so you can install things like Amazon Music and Youtube Music and stream audio which is nice.

Great sound and operation is smooth. Feels solid and looks great too. Plenty of power to handle all my IEMs with room to spare. Nice screen. Decent enough battery life for my needs.

Excellent player. Good sound. The reason i have knocked 2 stars off is the brightness of the unit is abysmmal. Yes the brightness is cranked up all the way. You can only make out what is on the screen if its directly in front of you. The slightest angle and its like using some ancient android phone screen from donkeys years ago.

I bought this for my son as he’s just getting into music and at 11 years old we were having the debate about getting a phone or something more dedicated to music. We opted for the latter and the hiby R4 came out top in most research for good quality entry DAPs. I’d already ordered when I was chatting to my neighbour who is a big audiophile. He told me not to order a DAP just yet. When I told him I’d already ordered an R4 he breathed a sigh of relief - he was going to demo his as proof of it being worth the price. Suffice to say when it arrived we weren’t disappointed. Songs I’d listened to for 30/40 years all of a sudden had new layers, new textures and were transformed. And this was on a pair of cheap wired Mario switch themed headphones. My son now has a fantastic music player but he can also have some elements of a smartphone such as clock / alarm / calendar and some streaming apps - but none of the toxic social media. Suffice to say one of these is now on my Christmas list.

very good player

I actually really enjoyed this, sounded great, felt like a tank, worked well too. Battery life was decent for an Android DAP. My only concerns were that it really wasn't practical too carry around in my pocket (my phone is big enough as it is) - a little bit too heavy, and a little bit too bulky. As it was Android 12 (we're on 16 as I speak) I was also a little worried about security. If I was only using this indoors, I would have kept it. I decided to go for the R3 II (2025) which isn't as pretty, but is small enough to hide in my pocket and powerful enough to have great sound.