Earlier this year, I bought myself the aforementioned digital audio player to give myself a way to listen to my music collection without pulling out my phone every time I wanted to do so. I did a lot of reading and research before settling on the HiBy – my criteria were basically “not Android”, since I didn’t want another platform that was spending battery life trying to run a bunch of functionality that I didn’t want, and I also wanted a device that didn’t have the ability to run random applications that connected to the ‘net.
The HiBy has that in spades. It’s a custom firmware (Linux based) driving some amplifiers, decoders, a small screen, and some hardware buttons. It does have WiFi support, but this is limited to loading data on to the microSD card or streaming from Tidal. It also supports Bluetooth, so it can be used with my noise cancelling headphones when traveling in noisy environments.
I ended up buying balanced cabling for both my Sennheiser and Sony headphones (the latter being the noise cancelling, the former being open-backed for video calls and general computer/music use), probably as a nostalgia nod to having a cable between the source of music and the ears. Also means that I don’t have to drain battery from two devices to listen to music (Bluetooth).
I will say that the default firmware from HiBy is “fine”, but it could be a lot better. I’ve tried the Rockbox port (not really designed to work on this kind of screen and button interface, unlike a clickwheel iPod for instance), and someone’s hacked version that adds offline music database calculation. However, my favourite alternative firmware so far has to be the Sonix one. It has
- better support for larger embedded images; the stock firmware hiccups if the image hasn’t been resized down, pausing before loading each song file,
- gapless playback support; not essential, but makes some albums so much better,
- audiobook support; none at all in the stock firmware,
- per output type volume memory like the stock firmware,
- better playlist support,
- podcast support,
- a Game Boy emulator (which I won’t use),
- possibly more audio format support, but I only use MP3 and FLAC
Mine is the orange variant, as I wanted to be able to find it easily. Black devices are everywhere, and so easy to lose track of when they’re in a backpack. The orange definitely stands out.
Wasn’t cheap at 200 USD, but it feels like a fairly good quality device, the touch screen is responsive, and the hardware buttons work well. Fits in my hand, produces good quality audio from the files I’ve got (don’t ask me about things like sound stage, I have no idea), and I don’t doubt the 21+ hours of playback claimed by the manufacturer. It does drain battery faster when using cabled headphones, but that makes sense – it’s running the amplifiers. Bluetooth uses less power on the device, but also uses power on the headphones. Swings, roundabouts.