Cayin N7 Portable Digital Audio Player Announced - Pure 1-Bit Android-Based DAP

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Cayin recently debuted its latest portable digital audio player, dubbed the “voyager of unexplored frontier” – the Cayin N7. The Cayin N7 features a fully balanced digital and analog circuit, with a 1-bit resistor network DSD decoding, discrete dual BJT low pass filter, and discrete JFET+BJT headphone amplifier. It’s an android-based DAP running on a customized Android 12 OS. It also supports MQA, wireless DAC, dual-band WiFi, and is powered by a Snapdragon 665 SoC with 4GB of RAM. Check out the official news release below for more details, including its full features and specifications.

Cayin Debuts N7 Dap With Discrete 1-Bit DAC, LPF, and Headamp

Cayin N7, the new portable Digital Audio Player (DAP) from the leading audio manufacturer, debuted worldwide in CanJam, New York 2023. Cayin surprised portable audiophiles with its unique fully-balanced fully-discrete vacuum tube amplified DAP back in CanJam New York last year. The N8ii became a reference and remained one of the most discussed DAPs today. The N7 takes a completely different direction by developing the first miniature pure 1-bit DAC circuit with four rails of the resistor network. This is probably the closest proximity to the analog experience in DAP application.

The discrete 1-bit DAC can native decodes up to DSD512 and accepts PCM up to 32 Bit/768kHz. We also developed a discrete LPF (low pass filters) circuit to tune the output stage of our 1-bit DAC to closely resemble the smooth and natural sound signature we have in mind. The headphone amplification of N7 is nothing short of spectacular; it is a fully-discrete, fully-balanced design with Cayin’s renowned Dual Amplifier Operation (DAO, choice of Class A or Class AB) feature. N7 is Android 12-based with Google play preinstalled, so it is streaming-ready.

Bin Liang, CEO of Zhuhai Spark Electronic Equipment Co., Ltd., the parent company of Cayin Audio:
“The audio industry has put a lot of emphasis on R-2R decoding technologies recently. Some users even assumed DAC based on resistor network are all R-2R. Cayin believes the 1-bit DAC has a unique position in digital audio, so we want to pay our respect by introducing the 1-bit DAC technologies to our users”.

In addition, we are excited to include MQA in N7 DAP. The N7 is streaming-ready, and from previous experience, Tidal is one of our users’ most popular streaming applications. Being able to use MQA technology to unfold the full potential of Tidal Master is important to our users. They can now access millions of MQA titles from Tidal Masters through our N7 DAP.

MQA stands for Master Quality Authenticated and is an end-to-end technology. MQA-encoded music is fully authenticated and captures 100% of the original studio performance. MQA playback is supported via streaming services such as Tidal Masters or downloaded MQA audio files.

When Cayin N7 plays back downloaded MQA files, the screen will display MQA or MQA Studio on the status bar below the album art, alongside the original file’s bit depth and sampling frequency information. On the other hand, when the user playback MQA content via Tidal streaming, N7 will display the Master icon instead.

‘Master’, ‘MQA’ or ‘MQA Studio’ indicates that the player is decoding and playing an MQA stream or file. ‘MQA Studio’ indicates it is playing an MQA Studio file, which has either been approved in the studio by the artist/producer or has been verified by the copyright owner.