ChrisOc
Headphoneus Supremus
I have to agree with you, dongles are pushing the envelope for the better without pushing the cost.I am a DAP fan and I don't mind bringing an additional device on the go just to listen to music.
However, lately dongles have really been quite game-changing in terms of price to performance ratio. Even a ten dollar apple dongle has quite good sonic fidelity (maybe it is weak in power only), and by just jacking said dongles into a phone, you can get quite decent sound.
In comparison, one needs to spend quite a bit of coin just to get the same sound in a DAP, as compared to a dongle.
Maybe a dongle/phone setup is limited by battery and memory, but this can be mitigated by bringing a charging pack or sd cards along.
But I have a feeling, with the evolution of dongles, DAPs are gonna be quite niche, especially the mega buck ones.
My two issues with dongles are; battery drain on the phone, which is resolved by inbuilt batteries on some dongles, but that increases the price, which makes cheaper DAPs attractive; and XMOS which restricts the use of some dongles to local files only.
Having said all that, DAP prices, at the top end, are getting silly!