The DAP and Portable Purgatory Rant

Warning: profanity, political incorrectness, racial overgeneralization, illogic, irrelevancy, subjective, and self-importance. Mods feel free to do necessary clean-ups.

I though it OK when AK240 transcended onto the earth. Sure, some super toy, no big deal, not going to be within my reach anyway. I was pretty shocked when AK240SS hit the market at by proclaiming stainless steel helps with sound with a $2,999 tag. "This is f'ing outrageous", I thought. Well, now we have an AK380 then a copper limited edition, asking for $3,999, as if using copper can bring more sonic goodness than using stainless steel. That's equivalent to 5,370 Canadian by today's rate, more than enough to pay for half year of my rent, and I can still get an additional pair of used HD650. Wow.

The DAP and portable world in recent two or three years has morphed into a purgatory, in which madmen are participating in an endless snake oil coated big dick contest. Maybe not even online, not even versus audiophile peers, but simply contesting the big dick against oneself.

Now I assume that UERM/Jupiter to be the very best price-performance examples in the premium portable scene (>=$750), then how are the other offerings performing? K3003 and SE846 have been cast into oblivion as the next big new thing get hyped, and they sounded muddy and somehow incoherent to me anyway. The whole wannabe JH Siren line might have Angie as an outlier (which sounds borderline OK but is ear-rapingly uncomfortable as the rest of the series), but then Roxxane may well be some Westone W60 abomination. The custom Layla being $2,725 is just a f'ing joke, that price can be translated into an Elekit TU-8200DX, a new pair of HD650, a Gungnir Multibit, and some nice NOS tubes, and maybe a meal at a Michelin restaurant, a pretty f'ing fantastic system which may well mean end-game for a lot. Noble 6 and K10 are overly warm, smooth, euphoric and have at best medium resolution to my ears. I know some people here well love K10 and would not hesitate to say it's the best SQ among IEMs, then think again a) if it's really an improvement over UERM and b) if the "improvement" is worth a $400 premium over UERM, assuming one's getting the very basic K10 SLA. As a resolution whore I would never ever think K10 being superior over UERM, and at most an alternative. Then even if UERM and Jupiter are good, they are good for desktop use, not portable.

Though I proclaim UERM/Jupiter as best price-performance examples, I'm not remotely convinced that any portable gear (in particular a single DAP) is able to bring out 50% (or pick your like) of their potential performance. No matter it's AK120ii or FiiO X7 or AK320 with amp deck or iBasso DX50 or stuff, they simply are not in the same dimension as Modi 2U to Black Diamond. A relatively well-implemented DAP can offer a solid improvement over a smartphone, but that's about the biggest jump. Any other "improvement" of a DAP after that point are at best subtle. There's also the dressing flavoured as incompetent-engineers-who-put-more-than-3-Ω-impedance-output-to-match-3-crossover-16-Ω-earphones. Or you can add something like and an ALO Rx or a Leck into the chain, but the size of that block of DAP+amp has already gone against the idea of portable.

After all, we are not going to listen to a full Ring cycle on-the-go, or to be limited with those "good" recordings. And anyway modern music are so f'ing heavily compressed and eq'ed, that there's not any decent DR left. Maybe that nouveau riche Asian kid who bought AK320 and K10U on scene by listening to Miku and Only My Railgun and AKB48 stuff was an extreme case, but for the majority of modern recordings, it's the recordings which hits the performance ceiling first, not the damn (portable) playback chain. Then again comes people mistaking tonal balance difference for improvements, and once such perception marries some ideas like "more expensive=better" and lossless >>> mp3, then it's unsurprising that I one day met some Gatsby-rich dude who walked into Headphonebar and pulled out his AK380 and Layla, and requested Travis to audit all top IEM offerings, to eventually proclaim his Layla was superior. Oh well, at least K10 came close. Local "musician" telling me mp3 is a sin by format but who eventually decided M70x > HD650. Then top it off with the fact that portable gear gets "real" exposure, that people actually may see that you're not using cheapo dollar-store earpods and a smartphone. But in fact, nobody cares a single bit. It's only you thinking that your gear have got "noticed". Manufacturers who are aware of such situations do not necessarily need to produce gear that sound good. As long as it's substantially expensive or BMW/Lamborghini-like designed, it's going to grab those shills' hearts.

 

Disappointing rant. Needs more cultural studies.

 

Back in 2008, I figured this would be all sorted out by now. I hadn't counted on smartphones becoming so popular. Presumably, that rather disincentivized making DAPs that cost only as much as--or less than--a good smartphone but function as well as one. I always figured that one of the big smartphone-makers would come out with a really good DAP at a fair price. So far as I know, it hasn't happened.

Part of the point of a DAP for me is to separate listening to music from using my mobile phone. I want something "special" that I associate only with music. It helps me concentrate or relax (whichever). Of course I want it to sound better than my phone and have a lot of storage, which can't be that hard.

From what I've read, it seems that a fair number of boutique DAPs are messed up by being designed to drive both IEMs and full size. Then there are the ones that hissss. And the others have slow GUIs and/or look worse than TouchWiz.

How so?

 

Needs more Ron Jeremy...

 

@Claritas I think you hit the nail on the head. The rise of smartphones have forced DAP manufacturers to make their devices do a bit of everything, instead of just focusing on making music sound good on the go. Now people want a DAP that's also a pass through DAC and has a line out and connects to streaming services and makes them breakfast in the morning too.

 

If the main theme behind your rant is, “Why don’t they make a good audio-only DAP?”, I can think of several:

- People who spend that much money on a DAP will want to listen to streaming audio. Even ‘audiophiles’ like to explore and would probably hate to have to switch devices to change sources. I know that sounds trivial, but I think it’s the reality.
- Sony got an almost equal amount of “bad” press for their ZX1 and ZX2 based on their upscale prices. Imagine if they didn’t have smart device capabilities. Again, I think even the most tweakiest audio nerds would rather take the hit in SQ to be able to stream Tidal or whatever on the same device. Even a Ferrari (street models) has air conditioning.
- Any decent UI will be touchscreen. The easiest thing (= cheap, fast) in terms of development and maintainability for this would be something like Android.
- The market just isn’t big enough… yet. Maybe the only reason why home audio has more sensible options is because it just has a much larger pool. From what I can tell there seems to be a similar distribution of crap, okay stuff, esoteric non-sense, and everything in between in home audio compared to headphone audio. And if there are gaps and unfulfilled categories, those will eventually be filled. The market is relatively young.

I haven’t really heard them enough to pass judgement, but I was pretty happy to see the pricing of the Pioneer XDP-100R and Onkyo DP-X1 ~$700 (a few hundred less direct or gray market). Hopefully more companies will start filling in that middle ground between Timex and Audemars.

 

I really don't believe that any portable rig can drive UERM (with the UE buffer jack) so well as Lyr 2 + Uberfrost. Or a BD fed by Modi 2U. And I think Chris F also thought that UERM scales with Ragnarok. UERM/Jupiter plus a decent DAP can be pretty good, but nowhere near their full potential.

 

Have gotten to the end of your rant I find myself disappointed I wasn't offended in the least



I agree with your rant, but I think that's the way the audio hobby has been in general, but maybe it's getting worse? On HF there are lots of people who derive their "audio expertise" on the fact they have very expensive gear. If you buy expensive gear you become an elite audio enthusiast. I think the DAP manufacturers are just cranking out more and more expensive products and raking in the dough.

 

My point of the portable world is that despite outrageous price increase we don't see many meaningful steps forward. In the rest of the market things like HEK, HEX, and Gungnir Multibit to my ears (and if including SBAF members' opinions, things like TH-X00, Ether, and HD800S) ARE genuine evolution in either SQ or price-performance. Can you name more than 3 pieces pf portable gear introduced in the past two years that offers either mind-blowing performance despite the price, or shockingly good price-performance?

Also the form factor of "portable" is severely limiting. It's pretty much agreed that no IEM will match the performance of a modded HD650, and a damn AK380 is a EC ZDS+Gungnir Multibit.

 

I agree with you on both points:

1. There's not reason for them to have any sort of improvement. The overpriced crap they're throwing out has people gobbling it up.

2. I've always disliked portable stuff. When I was first on head-fi in the 2008 / 2009 times, there was a big influx of these new portable amplifiers and DACs. Previously, there were only 3 or 4 portable units. Everyone gobbled them up, and the recommendations for them were crazy. You can take your hifi audio station with you anywhere! It's portable and on your desk!

Needless to say, I bought the hype (the first of many many times) and purchased various portable units. Each time I was disappointed at the poor performance compared to desktop gear.

 

Not the answer I was expecting, but it makes sense. Thanks. At the same, it doesn't really bother me because I don't expect that in a DAP. At this point, I'd be willing to take an iPod touch with a Wolfson chip and 512 GB (souped up AK Jr?).

 

I agree, I feel there's a lot of people in my local audiophile community being a bit in denial about having a $700 DP-X1 performing the same as that 240 and having balanced out performance on par with 380. I do feel that LG and Samsung needs to step up with their modularity game and just smash AK, Fiio, iBasso, and other DAP manufacturers.

I.... I... I listen to vocaloid mostly...

 

[QUOTE="Also the form factor of "portable" is severely limiting. It's pretty much agreed that no IEM will match the performance of a modded HD650, and a damn AK380 is a EC ZDS+Gungnir Multibit.[/QUOTE]

It is debatable. IMHO, my PSB M4U 4 is better than modded HD650 in terms of frequency response and speed. For HD 650 to perform like a top-class phone, one needs very good source, DAC, and amp. Otherwise, M4U 4 works better in many situations.

 

Hi,

I hope I read this correctly because English is not my first language but I think this is a curious rant because portable system serve a different purpose than a desktop one.

It's a bit like comparing a laptop to a PC tower. Obviously laptop does not have the performance of the PC tower but it's portable and you can put it in your bag. It also is more expensive but you don't see people complain why laptop usually costs more than a PC tower.

I own a home theatre, headphone and custom IEM systems and they serve different things. I take the custom IEM system to office in the day, when I want some quiet time or critical listening then I use my full-size headphone. Otherwise I listen to the speakers, usually with my family.

OJneg mentioned about culture and it's also a good point. I live in SEA and here in my region, portable system is simply far more popular. It's also probably the same thing in HK and Japan. I went to CanJam Singapore last month and as expected Noble, JH and Astell&Kern were one of the most crowded booths there.

I apologize in advance if any of my word cause offence.

Regards,
Jeremiah

 

I assume if only for vocaloid one only needs to get the tonality right.

 

Nope. Not gonna to apologize for this rip-off industry. I feel the OP's hatred.

The FACT is, thousands of dollars for what amounts to little baby ICs, entirely, or almost entirely, assembled from the Mouser catalog, is just not acceptable. They are not snake oil, insofar as they do produce better results than cell phones. But a cell phone has much better technology and engineering that goes into them; there is nothing special, advanced, or unique about the technology in these DAPs. And because they lack the space, power and thermal handling characteristics of a real desktop system, they are inherently inferior in terms of audio quality.

 

Things are worse in Hong Kong. In literally every headphone shop here you will see bunch of different shiny braided MMCX IEM cable and 3 inches long 3.5 to 3.5 cable interconnects selling over $500. The last time I went by they were selling this thing for over $200. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.631561880244139.1073741862.489487097784952&type=1
and not surprisingly everyone on the internet is hearing a huge improvement on their portable system after using this machine.
I guess buying stuff just for the sake of showing off is the nature of Chinese and portable rig does a better job?

 

I'd like to throw an Altmann Tera Player grenade and dive back out of this thread...

How much are they going for these days?

 

Right off the website:

2016 model Tera-Player LIGHT -> EUR 10.000,- incl. 10 years limited warranty

 

WTF is this product a joke? Looks like a controller for dancemania to me.