PiSkyHiFi
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2009
- Posts
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- 153
They are clones - they literally doing an exactly same whole thing by specs with tiny changes.
But it's up to them. Consumer electronics market is tough and it's tough to beat China at "time-to-market".
Amp performance is important, DAC is fine already - there is a space for increasing voltage to drive properly high impedance headphones and THD+N is not stellar on low sensitivity ears as well.
And aside from chips used - most important how a thing is done. There are plenty of top DAC solutions with results worse than a low-cost phone. So many ways how you can make BS product, while most people can't hear any difference and just chasing marketing promises.
I personally would not use LDAC over AAC anyway - at the same bitrate AAC is a clear winner and top end bitrate is a unicorn that works only in perfect RF conditions which are not available in real life.
And Windows 10 only supports SBC/APTX, so LDAC doesn't add much here, while there are no sources that support LDAC and not AAC (maybe Sony phones, idk).
So I hope Radsone is not going to put themselves in money draining situation - chasing every consumer request makes the consumer happy until competitors kill you.
P.S. I'm not opening codec discussion again, so I won't bite on any unsupported argues about it.
I'm just saying they aren't clones because they are all doing the same thing, even these guys - it's engineering, none of these devices would be possible without the the available chip-sets, so, they're either all clones of each other or simply packaged devices based on what's available. There isn't a device that does this kind of thing without one of the generic chip-sets. At least ES100 has a unique App and a unique CEO.
We've already gone through the whole codec thing, suffice to say, more options means more flexibility and more compatibility.