Most of the dap maufacturers are not clever enough to see that support, communication and taking actions is one of the big keys to the hearts and wallets of experienced portable audio fanatics.
When i read articles about products of the present manufacture names of the business theres the following ranking in some of the dark corners of my brainz:
Shanling
Always nice to read the threads about shanling products. Thats what i want. A lively exchange between Shanling and the users, discussions of solutions and very important: actions are following. That gives me a good feeling not being left alone with my device and finally got a company living to Philips old motto "Lets make things better".
Ranking: No. 1 - The winner... Congratulations, soon Shanling will rule the world and a handful over universes surrounding us.
Fiio, Hiby, etc...
I personally dont have any experience with their DAPs yet. Theres some threads going on but my spontaneous feeling is that i like the lively Shanling threads better. I sometimes watch news about the Fiio M9 and the Hiby R6 Pro but thats it.
Ranking: No. 2 - Nothing special on my mind here.
Cowon
When i hear/read the words Cowon & Plenue i always think about DAPs that are known for their very nicely done EQ-Options. I possessed a Plenue D once and have to say thats its a good one. Im always keeping an eye on their DAPs and when theres a beauty i cant resist i will saddle my horse and free it from the store.
Ranking: No. 2 (sharing with the above)
iRiver (Astell & Kern)
I really liked the iRiver MP3-players as i was in my younger years of life. Small devices driven by a single AA batterie for 24+ hours at higher volumes, providing awesome sound quality and tatatataaa a very good EQ. A & K and EQ... the A &K-fanboys will threaten me in a seperate corner of the hell for pointing this out again. But here i go:
A & K philosophy (i try to make it short): A & K are 99,9%* behind thesound signature of their DAPs. Why not? I had one of their players and it was sounding very good. The A & K DAPs come with an EQ. Just have a look at the newer A & K DAP tiers. The EQ-programm looks very nicely done. But the changes you can do with it are so tiny they are not even worth to call changes. So i asked A & K whats happening there?
Their original answer:
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We employ a passive EQ in all of our players, so any changes are very subtle. We do not believe in heavily manipulating the music digitally and try to produce a pretty neutral sound.
That being said, there have been a number of requests for a more active EQ system to be added and I will pass along your message to our software development team to support that request. While we cannot guarantee that it will be implemented in a future firmware update, the more requests we get for a feature add, the better the chances they decide to add it in the future.
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My thoughts: *Why wont they add the 0,1 % and stay 100% true to their sound signature. Why even bother implementing an EQ-programm that gives you mouth-watering expectationswhen you see it the first time. "That being said, there have been a number of requests for a more active EQ system to be added..." As you can imagine you are waiting and waiting... months are passing buy with no new update. Oh sorry there have been a mature update for my AK70MKII (already sold it) in this time. The spanish language have been added. Holá!!!
Ranking: No. 3 - Boutique DAP manufacturer with bad customer service. Could easily catch more customers with improved support and taking care of the customers wishes.
Whats happening to a head-fi user reading unsupported threads with no action: