Cayin N8ii

Four years in the making since Cayin's original N8 made history as the first portable tube music player ever, N8II achieves what its predecessor couldn't even have begun to dream of.

It doubles up on its 6P1 tube complement in its small signal gain stage, packing two Nutube dual triodes for true balanced, differential, operation from either its 4.4mm or 3.5mm outputs. 

N8II's Nutubes can be turned on or off on both outputs to match your listening preferences. If you choose to bypass tubes, signal direct from the DACs runs to the power stage, benefitting your gear that loves the precise, clean detail associated with transistors.

READ ALSO DAPs have gone down the tube

Taking inspiration from Cayin's tube/solid-state C9 portable amplifier, N8II's differential analog design relies heavily on common-mode rejection to serve as a clean, transparent – but never sterile – flagship reference with 125dB of signal-to-noise ratio.

A marvel of miniaturisation, N8II packs C9's discrete power stage, operating in switchable Class A or Class AB to put out up to 1,200 milliwatts. This bias system ensures the output of watts that are supreme in quality – a result of individual transistors being turned on and operated where their open-loop linearity is optimal to further push distortion down.

Cayin leave you the ability to boost N8II's operating voltage beyond 14 volts, further ensuring transistor linearity while guaranteeing headroom for large dynamic swings on bigger cans that need it. However, it's not only about the quantity of power, but more importantly the quality.

Signal integrity is key. N8II's volume control remains fully analog, eschewing a lossy digital control thanks to JRC's NJW1195A resistor ladder part, implemented only after the gain stage. Any attenuation is kept far away from the delicate output signal from new ROHM DACs – of which Cayin's implementation has been key.

READ ALSO C9 – nothing is too extreme for Cayin

BD34301EKV decodes DSD as a native 1-bit stream without PCM processing, owing to N8II's external analog volume control. ROHM's flagship chip's ability to output analog in current, pushing distortion figures down and upping tuning potential via N8II's extensive current-to-voltage I/V converter, also cannot be overlooked.

This small-signal segment beginning from the ROHM DACs has been overbuilt for a music player. But what might be considered extreme elsewhere, is only expected from Cayin. 

Currawong says "N8II is for people who must have the best DAP of its kind, regardless of the cost". 

ROHM's input signal processing via dither and advanced clock handling, plus a chip layout that's been streamlined for silent operation, are also talked up. N8II's FPGA feeds a pristine I2S signal to the dual DACs, after which they are upsampled by up to 32 times before being converted according to ROHM's linear-phase digital filters.

Cayin have deployed the perfect Google Play-based Android 9 UI to feed every imaginable kind of content to its shiny new digital sub-system hardware. Direct Transport Audio bypasses otherwise mandatory sample rate conversion of stock Android.

So play Tidal 16X MQA, Qobuz and Hi-Res Lossless Apple Music as the file was originally encoded with full confidence, with no undue digital tampering.

The flexibility yielded by Cayin's Snapdragon 660 CPU and 6GB of RAM running optimised Android 9 is phenomenal, and fully at the service of N8II – Head-Fi's most advanced and complete music player in 2022.

Those wanting more horsepower yet from Cayin can look at C9 as a potential stacking option from N8II's balanced line-outs here, browse Cayin's other revolutionary products here, or view all our other music players here.