I agree with you!
It's surprising though that Shenzhen Audio is giving one though, maybe through the manufacturer and drop isn't
I just explained the difference up there.
Shenzhen is a stockist so they have the items on hand. Even if they still refer you to the manufacturer chances are they can replace the unit anyway and depending on how easy the manufacturer is to deal with they can just sate you for now and they tell the manufacturer that it's for their mutual reputation.
Drop's business model only facilitates sales. They get a number of people who want something, they tell the people who make it, they get a few units plus a failure rate overhead. Very likely they return those units to the manufacturer, which is why you have to talk to the manufacturer. For the items that are perpetually on stock like Massdrop Ed items, that's different - they stamp their name on them
and more importantly there are K7XX and HD6XX all over the warehouse at practically any given time, despite the separate branding, are now part of the manufacturer's regular assembly line. They don't stock the DV336se.
I know this is diffIt's like cargo forwarding services where countries like the Philippines where inane and medieval tax laws can make shipping an item from Amazon not only expensive to ship but also paying for tariffs makes it worse but somehow because of an overseas worker population they want to sate large boxes with several items went unregulated too long under the guise that these only always include gifts. It wasn't until unofficial stockists popped up and Canon, Fuji, etc started complaining that these people don't pay tariffs on anything (because a crate legally declared full of cameras and lenses still gets taxed) and no licensing fees nor training costs to have their people certified to service those cameras. You buy from Amazon or wherever, LBC gathers them in a large box, pays a flat tariff based on Amazon cost declaration (instead of having to deal with the law that basically has a clause that goes "Customs inspector in post office in the Phl can call bull on your cost documents, including PayPal/CC receipt and billing"), you get the item; this service doesn't include shipping an item back unless it looks like it was damaged during shipping. And it doesn't eliminate the nightmare some guy encountered before: he didn't have a language barrier problem with AudioGD (I think he speaks Mandarin), so he got through quick, sent his NFB-12 or whatever back, then bam, when AudioGD ships a new item back Customs is charging him again because this wasn't even the same serial number as the one he sent out and had a receipt for. "It's a replacement!" yeah sure go to the Customs agent.
Or here's another that might be easier for people in better countries to understand since you've probably seen this in movies. Think of Reddington's business in The Blacklist, or that guy in Ghost Protocol. (Read the rest in a Slavic gangster accent and pretend you're Tom Cruise learning the ropes in an MI prequel) Look here, Yuri...Dimitri...Sergei...Philip...Ethan...You need something to go kaboom. Blow things up. You approach arms dealer. Arms dealer may have what you need: RPG, a cache of AK-47, MiG parts, maybe a SCUD or just warhead. You buy. If it doesn't blow up properly, arms dealer only liable to return money unlike Massdrop because you might put two in his head, but he still can't just offer replacement worronty because he sold you parts corrupt general sold, and kind of like Drop, can't just call the Mikoyan-Gurevich factory so they send you new MiG31 without Russian government approval because for all they know you work for Americans and want combat simulation against F22. (Accent ends here)
At the same, Shenzhen is based and staffed by people not in or from HK (unlike Fiio), so you're not just flipping a coin between "cheap, no warranty" vs "warranty" here, but "cheap, no warranty" vs "can I actually trust that they honor that warranty assuming I can even get a fast enough response as they chew through interpreters reading customer emails." Because at the very least that language barrier has been a complaint with even trustworthy direct from manufacturer brands like AudioGD.
