Hah! This one worked, as it's not Quick Look!
I wouldn't ding it for it's looks. Two of the best "high end" and "portable" units are the ifi Diablo and Earman Angel. These are also both portable in that they do have a battery, but they run hot and are really more portable as in "can carry it back and forth" rather than "can use in your pants pocket" type deal. While they aren't gamery they both sport paint coats that grab attention and are sort of odd for devices in that class and price range. There's also the Chord Mojo 2 in that range which while excellent looks like it was made by aliens on queludes in a 70s porn orgy after too much cocaine.
I'm still going to say I hate my MQA and it needs to just die but oh well. The cooling stand is sort of funny. I've got hot units as well and never had an issue but I don't strap them in leather cases. I haven't used this but I've also never had a bad FiiO product either.
These are a bargain compared to GPUs. Really the sub 1k market for DACs and AMPs is where it's at. Ditto for IEMs, dynamic over ears, and planar overears. It gets crazy outside of it and once you hit the five or six figure ranges it's minimal returns and you're paying for crap that's massively over engineered for what it needs to do, premium wood, single block aluminum, and even marble in construction. Also GPUs are giant wastes of cash even at 200 bucks. How often do you upgrade your GPU? It's way too often. It's a rip off and a racket. PC gaming is one of the most wasteful uses of consumer electronics and widely mockable, laughable, and a plague. Put it this way. How long is a GPU good? A few years tops and then you create electronic waste and buy again! This is a massive problem. You also never get the full performance out of them because of the OS and APIs and other nonsense you go through, the PC is a shit show on all levels for gaming. A console you can get about 8 years out of or more it's the vastly more sane and responsible purchase. High end audio stuff? Yeah that lasts DECADES. A DAC and AMP isn't something you buy and then toss when the upgraded version comes out it doesn't work like that at all. People run sound systems from the 70s which chug along and are just as good as what's out now. You want to run a GPU from the 70s? Never mind there was no such thing then you wouldn't run one from 20 years ago. So when you look at total value GPUs are the dumbest purchase possible compared to audio, gaming consoles, and even TVs. It's worthless quickly, creates tons of waste, won't last, and support ends fast. Might as well set your money on fire.
The GPU market is a churn and burn low margin, low value, doesn't hold value, doesn't last, make as cheap as possible market. The audio market is different and focuses on much higher end products that you epect to last decades or outlast you.
You brought up sneakers. GPUs are like sneakers it's value tanks the moment you get it and it's gone in a year or two. Audio is more like high end boots or dress shoes. You'll have it for 30 years and vintage sells for even more.
Also FiiO while considered a good and even great brand is still a budget brand.
This is something of a fraught conversation, because you and I have vastly differing calibrations on value when it comes to audio equipment. You're a pretty big gear head in regard to that stuff, whereas I assign more importance to it than the general population, but probably not by all that much. More than $200 for headphones is too rich for my blood for a point of reference, hence my comment about not being the target market.
Anyway, value is such a slippery thing. You're spot on about longevity of good equipment, and the point about churn in PC land is equally valid. Value, though, largely comes from uitility. Let's take the $750 price point of the Q7. If we stick with GPUs, that'll get you, as of this post, a 3070 ti or 3080. A body can easily clock 20+ hours a week PC gaming if that's one's thing. The TPU population is overrepresented by folks who upgrade every or every other year; around five years is much more common (witness the number of 1060s still in use). Our hypothetical buyer has 5,000+ hours of use of the card at this point. It's getting too old for new games, but is still baller for old stuff. So it (hopefully) gets CL'ed or eBay'ed for another five years of use barring failure (ten years is about the point when a vid card starts to become genuinely useless). Original buyer has gotten maybe $200 back in resale, leaving $0.11/hr of utility from their purchase.
I don't have a sense of how long/much/often DAC buyers use their DACs, but would wager that a customer of the Q7 is enough of an audio junkie to have all sorts of listening devices, and doesn't use it for anything near an average of 20h/wk. But let's say they do, and don't succumb to the lure of the shiny and buy a new DAC in the next five years or so. This subject will probably get ten+ years out of it before it's either broken or unsupported or something. In that case, they've gotten $0.075/hr of utility, or $0.065 if they can flip it when they're done with it after those ten years for $100. That's better than $0.11, but not huge all things considered. IMO.
We can also look at it from a materials side. A GA-102 or -104 is an expensive chip; let's ignore any underlying reasons for simplicity's sake. The general consensus seems to be that no one at this point besides perhaps Nvidia is making much margin on sales of cards built around them. They are very complex products, whose selling price is driven very heavily by BOM. This is where my understanding fails in regard to DACs. How much BOM cost is in something like the G7? Fiio is designing and manufacturing these themselves, so it's not directly comparable to GPUs where you've got two visible major parties (chipmaker and AIC) in the equation. My sense is that Fiio is making a
bunch of margin on these, along with the rest of the high-end personal audio market, which seems to be in a boom period.
Then there's the quality view. Here's another place where audio and gaming don't 100% compare, because good audio is good audio and has been for decades, and what's considered high-quality graphics is a moving target. The human factors are the same, I feel. Someone who's
really into a thing eventually notices small differences and/or deficiencies, and these things matter more and more over time. Your audio nerd can't abide sibilance, or overemphasized bass/mids/treble, or a narrow soundstage, or poor imaging, or what have you. Gaming nerd notices every dropped frame and screen tear, can't stand framerates below 75Hz, hates low-res textures, etc. All of these are things that when presented to 99.9+% of the population would prompt, "What are you even talking about?"
All that's a very long-winded, ranty/rambly way of reiterating that I can't satisfy myself why a little box that contains an admittedly specialized DSP and some op amps costs $750. Yes, I'm grossly oversimplifying the design of a DAC/AMP. The fact that you consider that price point "budget" speaks volumes in and of itself.
EDIT: spelling
