flymetothemoon
Headphoneus Supremus
Quote:
I don't doubt that this will be a nice DAP, but I'm not going to 'admire' this choreographed publicity offensive.
Putting glossy, pretentious ads in 'Absolute Sound' basically sums up what this is about - employing an advertising agency, at great expense, to attempt to 'condition' the minds of the DAP-buying public intobelieving that a product is worth substantially more than the hardware actually is. And that all began with creating a contrived 'posh'-sounding name.
The big joke of all this is that while iRiver are trying to charge the earth for their DAPs, their engineers are producing, for the most part, some really nicely-engineered hardware that could make iRiver a small fortune if only they'd stop being greedy and sell it at fair market value. They'd sell like hotcakes, iRiver's customer base would expand dramatically, and both iRiver and customers would be in a happy situation.
Before anyone accuses me of 'sour grapes' - that would be both incorrect and missing the point. There are plenty of very wealthy individuals who refuse to pay inflated prices for goods, but you just don't notice them because they're not the ones 'flashing the cash'. Many a millionaire buys secondhand cars, for example, but you only ever hear about the ones flashing the cash for new ones in fancy dealership showrooms.
Will I look at the AK240 and wish I had one? - Maybe.
But will I look at it and think "If I had the money, I'd buy that" - No, not necessarily.
No matter how much money a person may have, it is not nice to be overcharged, just because of expensive, orchestrated, glossy marketing of a supposed 'High-end brand name'.
I'm not knocking the DAP - I'm sure it will be a wonderful piece of engineering, and congratulations to the engineers working behind the scenes to produce a mini masterpiece.
What I'm knocking is the pretentious marketing and probable exorbitant price tag. ...and if, by some stroke of genius, iRiver surprise us all and offer this at a fair price, I'll very happily eat my words.Really, I will.
In my opinion, nowadays people have to spend a lot of time taken public transportation to and from work. They don't have too much time used at home Hi-Fi. So portability is a priority for them. Among them there are a lot of audiophiles which prefer one piece Hi-End DAP than 2/3 pieces of DAC/AMP in the pocket. AK240 and other TOTL
DAP can provide them superior SQ (although not as good as Home HI-End setup.) They also like new DAP and swap/trade in newer and higher model frequently (same as Iphone users). This is especially true in big city like New York. and some Asian countries like Hong Kong, Japan and Korea. So this will support Iriver's DAP products. Iriver is the first HIFI company to research and develop such a nice product nicely sound tuned to satisfy us. So they can demand such a price tag as competition is very few now. Could Flytothemoon and CosmicHolyghost express the HI-Fi culture in Hong Kong. I would like to know.
I want to clarify I own AK120 II but not AK240, I like the smaller size of 120 and a lower price.
I think a very similar syndrome happening in the tightly dense cities like Hong Kong, Tokyo etc where people have to pack in a very tiny society. I observed, even myself, people have suffered the GAS [gadget acquisition syndrome] to which we tried to entertain/excite ourselves by acquiring gadgets and AK240 was one of them.
When looking back in the last ten months I think I became one monster on spending and now still have difficulty to rationalise my own behavior.
To give justice to AK240, it is one hell of a DAP and if you ask me whether it justifies the price tag and the answer is an absolutely no...but I think this is the competition to blame as there is no parallel competitions even big gun like Sony's Z1 can hardly come close (a big disappointment to me while I expect Sony can easily compete with iRiver).
For now I'm happy with my current set up and have no plan to acquire any more items for my headfi.