Review on 🎵 S.M.S.L DP5 HiFi Network Music Player: MQA HIGH Resolution Lossless ES9038Pro DAC DSD256 | USB/I2S/AES/Coaxial/Optical Output | High SNR by Joe Unruh

This device has good features that attracted me. I have 3 streamers, they are all controlled by a Jriver accessing my NAS drive containing copied FLAC and DSD files via dlna. They all work fine but none have the AES output I need for the pair of powered speakers I ordered and the reason I bought the DP5. All other streamer options on the market with this AES option cost at least 4x the price, so I figured it was worth buying and trying. Revain had a returned device from the SMSL shop at a 10% discount so I placed my order. Upon receipt unpacked, connected and switched on. The first thing I noticed was that the height of the device was about 2x the height of my other streamers. While not a deal breaker, I would have preferred a thinner profile. I believe the size was adjusted to accommodate the large status screen, which really shouldn't have been that big. The second thing that really bothered me was the large front dial which felt very cheap, it was thin aluminum (I think) and when you turned it it creaked and wobbled. I had a feeling he might fall off his spindle at any moment. I launched the jriver and it immediately saw the dp-5 dlna and I submitted a few different file types to see how it would handle it. Every file type I sent worked without any problems. And it sounded fine to my ears (that's for the subjective part). At this point, I began to wonder if I could stomach the poor build quality and size. The answer became clearer after a little testing. Playing individual files worked well. When I played a playlist or selected more than one song to play sequentially, the DP-5 threw up. The best I could get was to play 3 incomplete songs before it shuts down and disappears from the Jriver player options. At this point I had to restart both. He would either play part of the first song and move on to the next, or not play the first song at all and move on to the next. I've tried every setting in DP-5 and Jriver but couldn't get it to play more than one song in a row with no issues. I was able to find individual songs or entire folders on my NAS using the device's clunky, awful UI and play it without any problems. This won't work as I'm only using jriver, but again for those interested it's excruciatingly slow and confusing as the internal control software isn't ready for prime time. It literally took me 3 minutes to find a song and play it using the front disk interface. This was a deal killer for me, but I figured I should try and see if something was missing (you definitely won't get any help from a "manual" device, it's WORSE than a front dial) and decided to Contact SMSL via Amazon. . They were approachable but not helpful. After a week with no fixes or ideas, they finally blamed my network (a hard gigabit that all their competing devices run with no issues). Jriver was actually more helpful as they told me that this very issue is common when the DLNA implementation in the device is out of spec and/or complete. They pointed out a number of other streamers who had this problem when the products were first released, but redesigned their dlna implementation and it's working fine now (with jriver). Lumin is an example. I had high hopes but had to go back as it didn't work when I tried it. For those who like to use the front dial on the device to select music, I can say that this worked for me. Just be prepared for frustration and long, slow software. If they could get all of these issues I would have no hesitation in buying again or recommending, but until then I would suggest that you buy your music system and try it on or look elsewhere.