I took a look on Amazon (I bought mine from there a number of months back, but from a 3rd party seller as the price was quite high at that time and I paid the $235 list as opposed to the almost $300 it was going for then) and found this little interview from iBasso in a reviewer's post (thanks to the poster):
...did some translation from a piece of an interview with the Chief Engineer ("Old Buddy" as his nickname) of iBasso at the company's headquarter Shenzhen, China. In a small part of the interview, the interviewer and interviewee were talking about the comparison between iPod and this sort of DX50-like players, the "Old Buddy" said:
"...you will find that we are not doing the same sort of things( refers to Steve Jobs) , consequently, the experience of the product is completely different. In fact, Jobs is not really a HiFi enthusiast, in my opinion, his understanding of the audio players is mainly from the perspective of ordinary people, thinking of how to make it more convenient and simpler when listening to music. When designing iPod, all the work focus on this core idea, but not so much on pursuing high-quality sound. When you read the book "Steve Jobs", there is nothing mentioned about iPod sound tuning, throughout it's all talking about how to integrate a variety of hardware in order to expand the capacity, meanwhile optimizing the system, so that the operation will be simple and convenient. Then the result is, iPod is unique and excellent on experience; but from the HiFi angle, it is not that outstanding. What he did to the portable players, in fact, can be seen as doing a subtraction: in order to make it convenient and fast, he continued to streamline the system and hardware. But we are not, we put the good sound in the first place, in order to achieve this goal, we are not afraid of trial work, we keep trying various parts, adding specifications, which is actually a process of doing addition. Through a careful comparison, you will find the conflict between two different positioning. We all admit that iPod is the model of easiness and convenience, but since doing HiFi is like doing addition, most of the time it has nothing to do with easiness and convenience, at least the volume would not be possible to approach the level of iPod. How do we do a addition? There are premises of a good sound: high voltage, less interference, independent components. High-voltage requires good power, the battery is even a compromise, preferably direct supply, but this won't be portable, so a boost is needed, requiring more devices such as capacitors and diodes; then about interference, it needs a good circuit design, if still couldn't be avoided, we need filtering and shielding; about independent components, it is fairly easy to understand, separate them as much as you can, don't integrate when you don't have to. So totally that will be a bunch of stuff, no matter how we try, after all we are not able to have iPod-like volume and weight. Besides, for the battery life, all of the inside devices would not be happy without enough electricity...."
