The future of FiiO's AMP&DAC --Written on the day when FiiO passed the MFi Certification Program
Dear Respected Head-Fi Members,
Words could not express my appreciation to you. The Portable Headphone Amplifier section is where FiiO takes off. In this lovely forum, I spent a large amount of time communicating with you and got numerous ideas, inspiration and help from you. To be honest, we wouldn't be able to design and produce so many fantastic products to share with all of you without your sincere help.
Unfortunately, as some of you might know, I haven't been here to communicate with you for almost a year because of my health issues. On the other hand, as the company is growing faster and faster and our product line is expanding, I have to spend more time on the management of FiiO and the development of FiiO’s staffs. Therefore, I have little time here to communicate with you and I'm so sorry about this.
However, it doesn't mean that I'm alienated from you. Actually, I miss the happy time when we discussed about anything here.
However, at the end of the day we have to come back to reality. That's why I'm writing this post to share with you our future plans. Also it would be easier for me to answer all of your questions in this post.
Before getting into our future plans, I would like to share a good news with you. FiiO has successfully passed the MFI certification! Meanwhile we are submitting a good deal of product planning to Apple for certification. Now rumor has it that iPhone 7 will come without the 3.5mm headphone jack. So this good news of FiiO passing the MFi really comes at the right time as we can make some adjustments to our new products planning.
Below are our plans for our future products:
First of all, we think that we need to update all of our portable DACs to support decoding for Apple's devices.
Then we will update all of our portable AMP & DAC to support 192K/24bit sampling rates and be certificated with "Hi-Res".
At last, we will define all of our portable DAC & Amp as Q series like Q1
In our future plan, our first target will be DAC & Amp including:
Q1(II): Q1 2nd Gen, MFi, "Hi-Res", brand new appearance design, similar output power and size with Q1
Q3 (actually the fifth generation product after E7, E07K, E17 and E17K): MFi supported, 192K/24bit format supported and DSD supported on the basis of E17K. Also it will adopt a brand new appearance design. Another good news to the Q3, the optical input will be back on Q3.
Q5: We will add decoding function for iPhone on the basis of our original plan. Besides, after in-depth research, we have decided to call off the WiFi connection because of its high power consumption.
Besides, to the iPhone users, we will have an i3 (the original iAMP3) in the future. There might be an i5 too. Different from the i3, i5 has no battery and will be powered by iPhone directly. Therefore, the target market and customer of these two products are different.
Since we need to hand in these product plans to Apple one by one and get down to real development after getting the permission from Apple. Then we need to pass the test and certification of Apple after we finish our development. So it will take a longer time to develop a new product than we used to and I couldn't have an accurate prediction of the availability of these products. But trust us, we're here to provide the best products to you.
In the end, I hope you can kindly understand that to produce any MFi products, we have to purchase lightning connector and related chips from Apple. Otherwise, it will be illegal for us to develop, produce and sell those MFi products. However, those components are quite expensive which will certainly lead to a little higher retail price of Q1, Q3 and Q5 to offset the increase of their cost.
Dear Respected Head-Fi Members,
Words could not express my appreciation to you. The Portable Headphone Amplifier section is where FiiO takes off. In this lovely forum, I spent a large amount of time communicating with you and got numerous ideas, inspiration and help from you. To be honest, we wouldn't be able to design and produce so many fantastic products to share with all of you without your sincere help.
Unfortunately, as some of you might know, I haven't been here to communicate with you for almost a year because of my health issues. On the other hand, as the company is growing faster and faster and our product line is expanding, I have to spend more time on the management of FiiO and the development of FiiO’s staffs. Therefore, I have little time here to communicate with you and I'm so sorry about this.
However, it doesn't mean that I'm alienated from you. Actually, I miss the happy time when we discussed about anything here.
However, at the end of the day we have to come back to reality. That's why I'm writing this post to share with you our future plans. Also it would be easier for me to answer all of your questions in this post.
Before getting into our future plans, I would like to share a good news with you. FiiO has successfully passed the MFI certification! Meanwhile we are submitting a good deal of product planning to Apple for certification. Now rumor has it that iPhone 7 will come without the 3.5mm headphone jack. So this good news of FiiO passing the MFi really comes at the right time as we can make some adjustments to our new products planning.
Below are our plans for our future products:
First of all, we think that we need to update all of our portable DACs to support decoding for Apple's devices.
Then we will update all of our portable AMP & DAC to support 192K/24bit sampling rates and be certificated with "Hi-Res".
At last, we will define all of our portable DAC & Amp as Q series like Q1
In our future plan, our first target will be DAC & Amp including:
Q1(II): Q1 2nd Gen, MFi, "Hi-Res", brand new appearance design, similar output power and size with Q1
Q3 (actually the fifth generation product after E7, E07K, E17 and E17K): MFi supported, 192K/24bit format supported and DSD supported on the basis of E17K. Also it will adopt a brand new appearance design. Another good news to the Q3, the optical input will be back on Q3.
Q5: We will add decoding function for iPhone on the basis of our original plan. Besides, after in-depth research, we have decided to call off the WiFi connection because of its high power consumption.
Besides, to the iPhone users, we will have an i3 (the original iAMP3) in the future. There might be an i5 too. Different from the i3, i5 has no battery and will be powered by iPhone directly. Therefore, the target market and customer of these two products are different.
Since we need to hand in these product plans to Apple one by one and get down to real development after getting the permission from Apple. Then we need to pass the test and certification of Apple after we finish our development. So it will take a longer time to develop a new product than we used to and I couldn't have an accurate prediction of the availability of these products. But trust us, we're here to provide the best products to you.
In the end, I hope you can kindly understand that to produce any MFi products, we have to purchase lightning connector and related chips from Apple. Otherwise, it will be illegal for us to develop, produce and sell those MFi products. However, those components are quite expensive which will certainly lead to a little higher retail price of Q1, Q3 and Q5 to offset the increase of their cost.
