AK isn't creating a market. It discovered one and now everybody is cashing in as we're benefitting from players that sound better than ever from a variety of sources while all the same cheap stuff still exists at the same cheap prices as before.
Oh, pleeeeze....
AK are iRiver. Let's not pretend otherwise.
And iRiver didn't 'discover' any market.
They produced respectable but middle-of-the-road mp3 players for years, and then seemingly decided one day to
cynically exploit those audiophiles around the world who cannot restrain themselves from spending disproportionate amounts of cash in order to satisfy their compulsion/addiction. It's barely any different from charging $3,500 for a 12 month supply of whatever other object/substance/experience an individual might be addicted to.
Whilst I concede that none of those compulsive audiophiles are physically
forced to spend their cash on AK gear, that
does not mean exploitation is not occurring. That's a key point. AK fanboys keep saying 'well if you don't like it, don't buy it', as if that excuses such sharp business practice,
but it doesn't.
I have neither seen nor heard
anything in an AK240 that I view as justification for it being price-tagged at anything more than
half what AK's dealer network are selling them for.
I also wonder how many AK240 owners realise they literally put around a
$1000 or so
directly into the dealer's pocket, during the transaction (I've known about this for a long time).
It's a dirty little semi-open secret, which I've alluded to as the AK 'gravy train', in the past.
Heads should be hanging in shame, but it seems some people have no compunction about grabbing
disproportionate degrees of money from their fellow humanbeings. Every person in the chain rightly deserves to derive a legitimate profit from their contribution to the chain, but the margins here are way outside the boundaries of what can plausibly be considered 'legitimate'. When Digital & Analog (themselves no angels) can R&D and produce their Calyx-M DAP for a thousand bucks or so
all-in, don't anyone try to convince me that an AK dealer can consider their contribution to an AK240 transaction to be worth the same amount of cash.
now everybody is cashing in as we're benefitting from players that sound better than ever from a variety of sources while all the same cheap stuff still exists at the same cheap prices as before.
iRiver does not deserve as much credit as you are giving them. There are many other engineers and companies working in the audiophile DAP marketplace, who do not exploit their customers to anything like the same degree as iRiver, but who nonetheless contribute to the evolution and improvement of DAP performance, at all levels of the market. People do not need to be cynically exploited in order for such evolution and improvement to occur. Dealers do not need to line their pockets with a thousand bucks on each DAP sale for such evolution and improvement to occur, even if the koolaid drinkers like to worship iRiver as the saviours of high-end DAP performance.
Nothing personal, goodvibes. I'm just addressing your points; not having a go at you, personally.
Even if I was an AK fanboy, I would still be asking myself a simple question:
Why does the AK380 have to cost so much more than the already-expensive AK240? It has a few more connectivity options, and a change in DAC chips, but other than that, it's barely anything more than a re-worked AK240. It doesn't even have increased onboard memory. We're not even talking about 'oh, it's expensive', per se, in this example. In this example, I'm
(hypothetically) 'accepting' the price of the AK240, but
still questioning why the AK380 deserves to be sold for an
even higher price. It doesn't. If anything, the development of the AK380 has derived huge savings in R&D from the foundational R&D of the AK240.
And all of this is before even considering the
cynical stainless-steel bling stunt, a mere couple of months prior to the announcement of the AK380. I say this as a fellow audiophile DAP enthusiast: those of you who love and adore iRiver, worship them, and sacrifice your income at the altar of all-things-AK, are painting yourselves into an ever-more-confined corner, with regard to trying to justify the endless price increases with each new model release. I respect the personal right of each of you to do so, but it just doesn't stack-up, rationally, to this onlooker.
