The reason why A&K is so expensive is the great R&D into resisting sensitivity, shielding against interferences while having Bluetooth and wifi built in, and together with USB DAC capability. The next thing in line that is capable of such is Onkyo DP-X11, which is sub $1000....but I doubt it is anything even close to S&K in sound signature
...man, did I really just convince myself in A&K ? No way, I hate their pricing astrocity
I
do have respect for iRiver's engineering team.
But please don't fool yourself - the reason A&K DAPs are so expensive is because of fat, fat profit margins. Do you realise an AK240/380 will (roughly-speaking) net the dealer around a thousand bucks per sale?
Cowon are trying to jump on the bandwagon, price-wise, which is sad to see, even though I appreciate them upping-their-game from a technical standpoint - it has been obvious to everyone in the industry that Cowon were being left behind by almost everyone, and they had to drastically revise their company approach to the marketplace. They've decided to follow iRiver and go premium - it's just a pity that they aren't doing that without price-gouging.
This has the danger (for DAP customers), that it may add momentum to the upwards-spiral of price for TOTL DAPs, across the industry, started by iRiver a couple of years ago.
On the flip-side, the Chinese are getting better & better &
better, with their DAPs, as time goes by.
It's an interesting time for the DAP industry... Increasing public awareness of higher-performance sound reproduction, on the move, so a gradually-increasing potential global market for premium DAPs.
In the short-term (2 yrs ago - up until the future couple of years), this may provide rich-pickings for Korean companies looking to price-gouge, but I see this as short-sighted, in
many ways.
In the longer-term (maybe 4-5years), I predict the Chinese DAPs will evolve to be so good that they will seriously go toe-to-toe with the performance of the Korean DAPs, and this may eventually mean that the Koreans end up like beached whales, with a dwindling number of customers willing to line their pockets for marginal differences over their Chinese competitors.
I feel the only area the Koreans are likely to remain ahead of the Chinese, for a while longer than the hardware aspect, is in the refinement & polish of the firmware & user interface. This is because there is such a strong firmware-engineering base in South Korea, on account of the smartphone industry (Samsung, LG, etc.). The stupidity of the Koreans is that they have all the necessary engineering resources to produce TOTL at sensible prices, and could take the market by storm. Just look at what the Korean smartphone makers are capable of producing, for substantially under $1000. Even allowing for differences in economies of scale, between thousands of DAPs and hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of phones, the point is that the fundamental engineering technology, and manufacturing technology, is very much the same.
For all that, and in spite of the obnoxious pricing, I do think the Plenue S looks like a lovely piece of kit, and I'd very much like to hear it.
...man, did I really just convince myself in A&K ? No way, I hate their pricing astrocity
