[goodvibes]

Many reasons including security, usability, battery life, and pure engineering concerns. The Android vs non-Android debate has been had in many places (even earlier in this thread) and is probably not a valuable use of time, suffice to say that there are many of us who are not buying an Android DAP.



Yikes. Would have been nice to see them support their current "premium" series product before they move on to greener pastures.

I don't think they're doing a new DAP. I loved my QP but I went to an Andriod DAP for Qobuz and be able to stream from my NAS. The M15 is very good so you can get that from your phone but it's still not up to a premium Android DAP. Not really sure what security anyone would be worried about with a DAP that is only used as a DAP. Hardly stops folks from having a phone, LOL.

 

[mwhals]

@Questyle

Maybe you could chime in on this thread.

 

[someyoungguy]

They mentioned in the other thread they were thinking about a new DAP but nothing definite in the works.

 

[monokrome]

Not really sure what security anyone would be worried about with a DAP that is only used as a DAP.

...tell me you don't know anything about security without telling me you don't know anything about security.

 

[goodvibes]

...tell me you don't know anything about security without telling me you don't know anything about security.

LOL, you're just being obtuse. If you use it as a DAP and turn the antenna off...
How much personal info do you need to have on it? The play store and whatever streaming service you prefer. I guess you don't use a cell phone with fulltime exposure due to security risks.

It was simply an unreasonable statement on your part. Anyone that reads this and had a security issue on their DAP other than by joining an open public network and actively giving away info, please respond. You know what? Respond even if it did happen due to your own error.

 

[Questyle]

Well hello there everyone! Thanks to @mwhals for bring up this thread with me, I actually wasn’t aware this existed.

Quick intro: my name is Zach Bielak, and I'm the Product Experience Manager at Questyle. Originally from the US, have lived in Shenzhen, China for over 5 years now, and a little under a year ago came on board at Questyle after having been friends with the founder for a while. The QPM was released before my time (and they also stopped manufacturing new units before I joined the team), so even though I’ve used it a bit, I still haven't had enough hands-on time to know all of the details… so if any of my questions/comments seem basic or obvious, please forgive me.

So now, for a very short bit of history. 2019, as the CEO and founder told me himself, was a terrible year for the company. It was the perfect storm of trade wars, Chinese economy taking a hit, and also some serious issues with some of our international partners, which led to the company almost closing. An alternative, and perhaps even more accurate, way to phrase it would be we faced “almost complete obliteration" as @brams suggested. Thankfully, Questyle didn’t completely obliterate. And why do I say thankfully? The founder and current CEO of Questyle, Jason Wong, is an incredibly intelligent engineer and a man who is in a serious love affair with music. I’ve invited him to my house many times before to listen to music, he’s invited me to his, and I hope you believe me when I say he has the right heart about all of this. He loves technology, he loves music even more, and he simply wants to make products which innovate, which he is proud of, and which can hopefully let more and more people understand just how powerful music can be.

Jason Wong is an electrical engineer himself, and did his thesis about current mode amplification for audio — which, in combination for his love of audio, led him to starting this company and really seeing what this weird thing called “CMA” can actually do. You can "virtually meet" him in this video if you're interested (and I suppose virtually meet me as well ）:

I’m also an engineer (a mechanical engineer), and it takes one to know one: I think most people will agree that us engineers don’t always make the best CEOs. We love the science, we love the details, we love making products that work and work excellently… but we sometimes forget that there are MANY other facets of running a successful brand. As naive as it may sound, when Jason got into this, he thought that to run a successful technology company, you simply make incredible products, send them out into the world, and then focus on making the next product. He didn’t realize how CRITICAL after-sale customer support is (and I can’t blame him… at least in the past, Chinese business culture didn’t quite value post-sales customer support). On top of that, nobody in the company at the time spoke English at an adequate enough level, making international customer support almost impossible. But — things are different now. The economic hard times are over. And the team, thankfully, has grown, and now it’s international, and there’s new upper-management as well, and this has been tremendously helpful for the entire team, including Jason and all of the engineers, to realize precisely what went wrong in the past, what mistakes we made, and how we should start down the road of fixing them.

To be very frank with you all: in the past, we made many stupid mistakes as a company, but really, the biggest mistake we made out of all of them, is the way we treated and took care of our customers after they purchased our products. So on my behalf of the team, really, we’re tremendously sorry about this. At the end of the day, words are just words, saying “sorry” means absolutely nothing, so instead we are committed to PROVING we are actually sorry by doing our best to correct this mess.

Alright, history lesson over. Moving on to the action items:

I’ve just spent the last hour reading through the previous pages of this thread and did my best to collect the issues you all brought up. I put them in an Excel document to share with the engineers, and I’ll do my best to follow up on each item.

See the screenshot below. If there are any other issues you’d like to add, or anything that I should correct, please do let me know.

About the new DAP coming out: indeed, Jason told me they are beginning to think about a new DAP, one that has a very unique place in the market. At the same time, I’ll be very honest with you, at the moment the team is working on over 6 different new products, in many different areas. Our engineering team is incredibly talented and very tight-knit, almost like a family, but there’s only 5 engineers total… meaning, progress isn’t the fastest on the planet. So be patient with us please Jason told me that there is one in the potential-product pipeline, but he didn’t share with me the specific details… and I think it’s best for me not to ask him, because I’ve seen first hand just how many iterations our products go through before they are released. I watched them develop the M15, and saw that many of the features they wanted to build in weren’t feasible, and during development new features that weren’t considered before suddenly because readily feasible… so I don’t want to create any false expectations for you all. And there’s a chance, if the DAP we do end up developing, doesn’t have enough overall “value” and doesn’t push the limits of a DAP, or simply doesn’t stand out beyond any of the other devices on the market, we might not release it all. Questyle really wants to make never-before-seen products, things that really move the audio world forward, so we do our best not to release ho-hum products just to earn an extra buck.

Similarly, due to all of the ongoing products, I will be very honest and say that major updates to the QPM might not be as fast as you all desire. And I am really quite sorry about that… all of the issues mentioned in the screenshot below are things that should have been dealt with a LONG time ago, and it’s inexcusable that it’s taken this long to respect and care for our QPM customers… but, the past is the past, we can’t change what we’ve done, we can only prove that we are committed to our customers by correcting these mistakes. Please be patient with us, we are actually onboarding some new engineers recently but as you can imagine it takes them a while to get up to speed, especially with hi-end products like these.

In the meantime, if any of you have any other issues with our products, comments about either the product or our company, advice, critiques, anything you’d like to share, just let me know. You can message in this thread, or to my Head-Fi PM, or do my email zach.bielak@questyle.com . As is quite obvious… I love chatting, and even more than that I love effectively communicating (aka the precise thing Questyle failed to do in the past). So bring it on. Let’s chat

Last thing, regarding specifically the noise / audio quality / distortion issues that anyone is facing. I know it’s hard to use words to describe these things. If any of you are able to capture what is happening in video form (perhaps by connecting the QPM to a speaker system), please do so if you have the time, and send it to my email address above. I’ll personally make sure the engineers see these videos. Plus, as there is still a language barrier of sorts, videos are much more helpful than written descriptions in allowing the engineers to assess the issue. Of course, the BEST possible solution would be to fly an engineer to you to fix it in person… but as you can imagine, travel to/from China is still not the easiest thing to do right now

 

[brams]

Good, open and honest response from @Questyle.

Anyone that reads this and had a security issue on their DAP other than by joining a open public network, please respond. You know what? Respond even if it did happen due to your own error.

Never had a security issue from an Android Dap nor am I aware of anyone who has. However, I do respect that some may have serious concerns given that many Android based players allow the install of any app, the Play Store has many documented cases of security compromised apps and that connecting an infected device to a computer or laptop (for file transfer for example) or using a SD card in multiple devices could easily spread the contamination.

If care is taken I think these concerns can be minimized, but I don't think it would be accurate to say that no threat exists.

Hopefully this will not degenerate into an argument of who is right since ( as is often the case) there is truth in both positions.

 

[Questyle]

@brams Completely agreed. There are pros and cons to using Android system in a DAP... many many factors to consider simultaneously, and certainly not an easy decision especially for engineers. But its certainly not something worth arguing about... different strokes for different folks. As long as everyone is aware of these security aspects, that's all that matters.

As a personal note, I do care quite seriously about my personal information security, and have spent countless hours (probably days even) making sure the devices I use are as secure as possible. But at the same time, I do sometimes let security take the back-wheel when deciding to buy some products, if they excel enough in certain areas compared to the competition.

 

[goodvibes]

Good, open and honest response from @Questyle.



Never had a security issue from an Android Dap nor am I aware of anyone who has. However, I do respect that some may have serious concerns given that many Android based players allow the install of any app, the Play Store has many documented cases of security compromised apps and that connecting an infected device to a computer or laptop (for file transfer for example) or using a SD card in multiple devices could easily spread the contamination.

If care is taken I think these concerns can be minimized, but I don't think it would be accurate to say that no threat exists.

Hopefully this will not degenerate into an argument of who is right since ( as is often the case) there is truth in both positions.

I never said no threat exist, just that it's significantly smaller than an android phone with normal uses. If you use it for more than a DAP and music streamer, it becomes more vulnerable but still less so than even a phone that has constant connections, via cell data. Find me that person without a cell phone and I'll accept that an Android DAP is too high a risk for that individual even though it's still many times less so.

 

[brams]

I never said no threat exist, just that it's significantly smaller than an android phone with normal uses. If you use it for more than a DAP and music streamer, it becomes more vulnerable but still less so than even a phone that has constant connections, via cell data. Find me that person without a cell phone and I'll accept that an Android DAP is too high a risk for that individual even though it's still many times less so.

I think we are agreeing vigorously with each other as to the level of threat that can arise from an Android based dap used strictly as a music streamer if proper precautions are taken! Your point is well made and I don't think anyone is disagreeing with it. It's just that for some even the slightest threat is enough to steer them away. I might not share their level of concern ( I am an every day android user), but I certainly respect their point of view.

 

[goodvibes]

I think we are agreeing vigorously with each other as to the level of threat that can arise from an Android based dap used strictly as a music streamer if proper precautions are taken! Your point is well made and I don't think anyone is disagreeing with it. It's just that for some even the slightest threat is enough to steer them away. I might not share their level of concern ( I am an every day android user), but I certainly respect their point of view.

Agreed. My point was simply that it was clearly overstated earlier in this thread and having this same newbie tell me that I don't know anything about security because I disagreed with his overzealous take was completely uncalled for. I'm old enough for grand kids and work with networks almost daily.

 

[monokrome]

My point was simply that it was clearly overstated earlier in this thread and having this same newbie tell me that I don't know anything about security

The idea that you don't understand security is something that anyone who knows anything about security can identify easily by simply reading your last few messages and considering the flaws in how you've failed to consider even obvious risk, have failed to properly model primitive threats, and have failed to consider history of exploitation via Android devices. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion like this, but - like I original said - the debate provides no value in this thread. I am definitely not a security "newbie", but that's a nice story to tell yourself if you want to pretend instead of learn something. Again, you form a narrative based on a lack of knowledge instead of based on a reasonable analysis.

My point was simply that it was clearly overstated earlier

How did I overstate it? My only take was that some people do not want to use a DAP that runs on Android. I never said whether you should or shouldn't because it's up to you to analyze your own risk, which is unfortunate since you've demonstrated the inability to do so in a logical manner. Whether this is "overstated" is an individual analysis and an assumption in either direction without understanding individual risk is an example of shining ignorance. What is there to disagree with in that? Are you in all honesty suggesting that nobody exists who should consider the security precautions here? That would be a naive assumption. The fact that you can't just live and let go on this seems to suggest maybe you're just a troll.

I'm old enough for grand kids and work with networks almost daily.

As a software engineer with a strong emphasis in security who has helped build security teams at companies you've definitely heard of and has read your previous analysis, that's terrifying. You've exemplified in just this thread why you should not be making security decisions for other people.

Have a nice day, though. Hope you can move on instead of bringing us back to this off-topic discussion again this time.

 

[goodvibes]

The idea that you don't understand security is something that anyone who knows anything about security can identify easily by simply reading your last few messages and considering the flaws in how you've failed to consider even obvious risk, have failed to properly model primitive threats, and have failed to consider history of exploitation via Android devices. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion like this, but - like I original said - the debate provides no value in this thread. I am definitely not a security "newbie", but that's a nice story to tell yourself if you want to pretend instead of learn something. Again, you form a narrative based on a lack of knowledge instead of based on a reasonable analysis.


How did I overstate it? My only take was that some people do not want to use a DAP that runs on Android. I never said whether you should or shouldn't because it's up to you to analyze your own risk, which is unfortunate since you've demonstrated the inability to do so in a logical manner. Whether this is "overstated" is an individual analysis and an assumption in either direction without understanding individual risk is an example of shining ignorance. What is there to disagree with in that? Are you in all honesty suggesting that nobody exists who should consider the security precautions here? That would be a naive assumption. The fact that you can't just live and let go on this seems to suggest maybe you're just a troll.


As a software engineer with a strong emphasis in security who has helped build security teams at companies you've definitely heard of and has read your previous analysis, that's terrifying. You've exemplified in just this thread why you should not be making security decisions for other people.

Have a nice day, though. Hope you can move on instead of bringing us back to this off-topic discussion again this time.

LOL. So you brought this up and claimed security was the issue and then gave a rude response, when I said the risk was minimal but 'I' took it off topic. You then got rude again in the above just like below. Why?

Not really sure what security anyone would be worried about with a DAP that is only used as a DAP.

...tell me you don't know anything about security without telling me you don't know anything about security.

You called me rude when in fact, it was a simple observation and then decided to start attacking me. I've been on this board a long time and have not heard of one security issue. I suspect there's been one from someone surfing on an open network but still. Come on. We don't need a degree to understand this.

Of course some people don't want Android. I didn't for quite some time due to background processes, antenna noise etc. interfering with the performance but the better makers have now worked around those issues. Making a current player without access to Tidal/Qobuz or the ability to stream local files from a NAS would be a mistake. Same reason you can't find a decent TV without same. You need a market or it doesn't how good the mousetrap. Yes, there's still things like the Lotoo 6000 for a about a grand that doesn't stream but it's years old, made for a limited market and on discount for a reason.

Look, I've owned all the Questyle players because they are great and also owned a Lotoo LPG because sound matters to me. I get it but I wouldn't buy another player that can't play the 19tb of HiDef music on my NAS or give me access to discovering new music on Qobuz. I think you'll find the vast majority of people feel the same way I do and that's the point. Questyle is still a company with a bottom line that makes really high performing products for the cost of admission. You can't fit that profile with severely limited sales due to lack of expected features. Their M15 dongle and CMA15 home DAC are world beaters but they wouldn't exist without a market. Their QPs sound as good as they always did but are going away due to lack of sales. There's a reason and it isn't performance. Addressing those reasons is very much on topic... unless you steer it away again.

So lets start anew. Maybe you can help the board with a recommendation on a security program for their PCs and DAPs. I use Malwarebytes at home and don't need one for my DAP usage. I used to stack on top of Malwarebytes but find it's more comprehensive than it used to be and like the small footprint. I'm also pretty aware of potential threats. I say that as I download torrents, LOL.

Do you have preferred VPN? I use Express.

I'm serious here. If you have some guidance, I'm sure many here would appreciate help from a professional.

 

[brams]

Great to see the olive branch extended in an attempt to get this thread back on track. Let's not forget ... this should be fun!

 

[monokrome]

So you brought this up and claimed security was the issue and then gave a rude response, when I said the risk was minimal but 'I' took it off topic.

I specifically said that some people don't want an Android DAP and cited security as one of a few reasons why that may be. I wasn't the first person who gave a "rude" response, and my first message (before you trolled along) came to the point of "it's not worth arguing this here and it's off topic". You didn't take it off topic. I brought that up before-hand.

Again, security 101, you can't identify the risk without an individual threat model. Your previous risk assessment was about someone attacking the DAP as well and ignores that an exploit in a DAP can be used to exploit other devices by using it as a way to get on onto your (or someone else's) network. Every situation has a different threat model. Go read a book.

I've only read your first sentence, which I quoted. I'm not reading further of this from you. Please get over it and move on.