Special thanks to William from HiBy for securing one of the first RS8 II demo samples outside of China for me. I’ll be returning it to HiBy once I complete this initial review – and the full review in the new year – and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to explore it until then.
When HiBy released its then-flagship RS8 in 2022, I called it the ‘R2R summit’. Even though it wasn’t the first premium DAP to use a discrete R2R DAC – that distinction goes to HiBy’s RS6, released a year prior – it cemented for me what was a true milestone at the time: desktop-grade R2R in a portable format.
Fast-forward three years, and that not-insignificant summit has finally been breached. In RS8 II, the spiritual, if not visual, successor to RS8, HiBy has not only advanced the science of portable R2R with a series of technical innovations that give it Deltra Sigma-esque ultra-low distortion performance, but it has also created a DAP that – at long last – brings Android DAP performance much closer to flagship smartphones.
This latter part may not be important to some, but having craved this sort of performance for years, despite naysayers constantly claiming it’s meaningless in a music player, I can tell you that it’s not only meaningful, it’s game-changing. Having acclimatised to the sheer speed, fluidity and smoothness of the RS8 II user experience over the past few weeks, I don’t even want to think of going back to older Android DAPs.
But I digress. Since this is not going to be a full, in-depth review, I’ll try to avoid too many superlatives and stick to the fundamentals of what you need to know if you’re in the market for an ultra-premium DAP. At $3,899, this is by far HiBy’s priciest DAP, which is not something you should take lightly – unless money is no object and you just want to have fun, mortgage and college fund be damned!
Packaging and accessories
I’ll delve into more detail about the rather cool clamshell box RS8 II comes in, and the quality of its various accessories, in the full review. For now, I’ll just share my unboxing pictorial here so we can get on with discussing what’s new and how it sounds.
Continue to what’s new…
