Are these chinese companies such as smsl or topping using similar components in their flagship dacs or actually sourcing for totl components?
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The actual DAC chip is bought external anyway. AKM and ESS sabre are found in the top ranking dacs. Of course they still have to build the circuit around the chipset.
If you have a look at DAC measurement rankings you will find mostly Chinese brands up there.
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I think your question may be a bit off base at its conception. While there absolutely are “TOTL” components like transistors, capacitors, and a number of other things (though what counts as TOTL obviously depends on what its being used for), the actual design and implementation of said design often plays a larger role in how the dac performs than whether the electronic components are truly TOTL. This is especialy true for dacs that focus on proprietary filtering technology (ayre) over something like making a dumb precise R2R ladder (Holo). Another great example of this is power supply design.
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Hello,
Yes they do to answer your question.
In reality, Topping, Smsl, Xudoo and many more are a huge corporation. Or are subordinate to the concert.
How they work among themselves is questionable, as so often they end up serving the corporation where it is all about maximum profit.
That is why it is not always surprising that the devices are quite close or close to each other in the measurements.
Even if that is more relative.
No one knows how this really works - it is certainly kept well under wraps.
And in general you can assume that Chinese products are only produced when it is profitable and the business has been settled beforehand.
It certainly doesn’t work the way we know it in Europe or America.
Why do you do that?
In the end, it’s all about the profit that comes out of it - everything else takes a back seat.
You can assume 80-90% that the same chips, capacitors, etc. are used.
Since they probably compete with each other, the circuitry is different.
But the principle is very often the same.
That is why other Chinese manufacturers such as Questyle, Matrix Audio and Singxer differ very much from what the company offers.
With these 3 manufacturers you can be sure that everything is individual.
Because they do not belong to the group.
For a start, the Dacs are actually quite okay.
But many then go one step further and higher. So they spend a bit more money on something solid.
Somewhere we already had the discussion that the implementation is just as important.
And certainly what the market offers in terms of variety is not always the best.
And above all, measurements are something else you can’t always go for.
Many old products, such as the Little Dot Dac 1, may be technically old, but it still delivers better than what is currently fashionable.
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Likely, they are buying proper chips.
But just like ingredients in cooking, the components are only half the meal.
Not saying sample bias, but 
As with anything that has recognisable branding on it, there is a chance someone makes a counterfit (= fake) version of a similar component for cheaper. Sometimes you get some B-tier “fallen of the truck”-type components, sometimes you get plain garbage (see links below).
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Typically with the higher end dacs from topping and smsl (since they were mentioned specifically), they will spend more to buy the flagship dac chipsets from akm (well not anymore lol), ess, cirrus (could include things like ti or analog devices but they tend to not use those), but when it comes to other component quality such as caps, resistors, transformers, opamps (they typically don’t cheap out there but sometimes), etc they typically don’t go for the highest end (to be fair though they aren’t in the price range where they can really afford to either).
As mentioned beforehand it’s all in implementation for the final sound and results. A poorly implemented DAC with high tier components will sound worse than a well implemented dac with mid tier components (likely, there’s no exact way to test that and what defines poor and good implementation will depend on the person). I’ll just say with the high end topping and smsl dacs you are paying for the measured performance on paper, if that actually lends itself to real world sound quality is another story and I’ll let you be the judge of that lol
Edit: and yes also in some dacs proprietary code for digital correction/filtering/dsp/what have you can also be considered a component since the quality of that code does impact the sound at times
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