Exactly. We are talking about what kind of a DAP can be reasonably built in relative small quantity for $200 price tag and still ensure a profit for future R&D, but somehow I keep getting the idea that this $200 DAP should be $800 (or $400 if that matter) sounding. Remember an E7 alone is a $85 piece of amp/DAC. Even if we assume half of it is production+material cost, it is still $40 on the DAC and amp section alone. Then adds the SoC with the PCB, which just randomly assume it is another $40 (you can't save a lot of cost because you are only ordering a few hundreds to a thousand of them, which is very small in quality for a custom job), and there is already $80 of materials. Add the odds and ends and let call it $100 to make this supposedly X3. That's just the cost of making an X3, not selling it. To cover the overhead and ensure enough profit, let's put a manufacturer profit margin of $30 ($50 would be more realistic, but lets just put it lower). So the distributor get it at $130, and they need to add their own profit onto it because they already paid upfront, plus shipping, storage and custom tax (from FiiO to them), and now this X3 is close to $200 on retail.
Do you see my point? $200 really only goes that far and no more. That's why from very early on I have said that FiiO doesn't have the benefit of mass production on X3 to make it cheap while audiophile sounding at the same time. If you want a DACport or just an ODAC+O2 inside, the price will just climb up accordingly. That's the problem of small scale manufacturing.
