When I posted my first impressions review of the RS8 II back in November, I called it the most complete modern flagship DAP to date, said I was genuinely excited about where HiBy had taken its flagship line, and promised a full, in-depth review in the new year.
Several months, a handful of firmware updates and hundreds of additional listening hours later, the time has come to make good on that promise‚ and to give you the full, unvarnished picture of what HiBy has actually built here.
Make no mistake: RS8 II is a landmark product. In the history of Android-based digital audio players, I’d argue there have been only a handful of genuine inflection points, moments where a DAP didn’t just iterate on what came before, but genuinely moved the goalposts.
The original RS8 was one of those moments, cementing desktop-grade R2R in a portable format for the first time. RS8 II, I believe, is another, and perhaps an even more consequential one, because what it’s moving isn’t just the audio performance bar. It’s redefining what a portable audio device can and should do in 2026 and beyond.
But it’s also, and I say this as someone who genuinely loves this device, a work in progress. HiBy has shipped something extraordinary. Now they need to finish it. More on that throughout.
One last thing before we dive in: if you haven’t already read the first impressions review, I’d encourage you to do so. It gives some useful context for where my head was at in those first weeks with the device, and the full review builds directly on those initial findings.
Ready? Good, let’s get into it.
Why RS8 II matters
To understand why RS8 II is such a pivotal product, you need to understand the world it stepped into.
For years, arguably the better part of a decade, Android DAPs have been stuck in a peculiar technological time warp. While the smartphones in our pockets have sprinted ahead with each successive generation of system-on-chip, DAP manufacturers have been content to recycle older, slower processors and dress them up with premium audio hardware.
The argument, not unreasonable at face value, was always that you don’t need a fast chip to play music. The counter-argument, equally valid, is that you most definitely do need a fast chip to run an open Android platform smoothly, manage large music libraries efficiently, stream wirelessly without stuttering, run complex real-time DSP, and execute the sort of AI-driven audio processing that’s rapidly becoming a meaningful differentiator in this category.
RS8 II is the first DAP in the world to decisively break from that pattern. At its core sits a Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS8550, the same platform architecture underpinning the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which you’ll recognise from flagship smartphones released in 2023.
The performance jump over RS8’s older chip isn’t incremental; in my experience, it’s closer to three or four times faster, and it changes the fundamental character of what it feels like to use a DAP. To my mind, this isn’t a nice-to-have at the $3,899 price point: it should now be the absolute minimum standard for any DAP that dares to ask for more than a thousand dollars.
The rest of the industry will catch up eventually, it always does, but right now RS8 II sits alone in this respect, and the experiential gap it creates over every other Android DAP on the market is not subtle.
If you’ve spent any time with the leading competitors at this price point recently, the difference when you pick up an RS8 II is immediate and striking. This is what a modern DAP feels like. Everything else, right now, is history.
And then there’s Darwin III, HiBy’s latest-generation discrete R2R DAC architecture, rebuilt from the ground up with a massively expanded FPGA and on-board AI that I’ll discuss in detail below.
Combined with a genuinely thoughtful new design, a suite of cutting-edge connectivity features, and a software platform that’s beginning to show the first glimpses of where AI-driven audio can go, RS8 II isn’t just the best DAP HiBy has made. It’s the most technically ambitious portable audio device any manufacturer has shipped, and a clear signal of what the next generation of flagship DAPs will have to do to compete.
None of which means it’s perfect. But let’s start at the beginning.
Continue to key differentiators…
