Oh, my mistake, I thought the HO100 was a DAC/amp, you’re right it’s just a DAC. It’s funny because it seems like almost everything portable has a balanced out. Like for $100 you can get a BTR5 or a Qudelix 5k with balanced, and for $250 you can get a Cayin RU6 with balanced and an R2R DAC, which is kind of amazing, though admittedly none of these have pre-outs that someone in a desktop situation would probably want, and the UX controls aren’t as good as what you’d get on a desktop thing.
I mean, this is a valid point (I thinking I mentioned in one of my comments that the Zen DAC is such an established product it might be hard for them to kill it). The thing is they could make the Zen DAC make sense. Give it more power like the K5. Maybe kill the Zen Can and give the Zen DAC v3 as much power as the Can has for the same price. NOW you’d have a killer product, something that could really give competitors like Fiio a run for their money. In fact, this is exactly what Fiio is doing with the K5, but the Zen DAC has more features like the bass and 3d buttons and the Burr Brown chip which they really need to make a bigger deal about because it’s the thing that all the competitors don’t have. Like look at how Schiit sells the Mimby as like this unique multbit chip that no one else has. The Burr Brown chip in the ZenDAC is a multibit Delta Sigma! If even says “Burr Brown Multibit” on the logo thing. Like shout about that, make that a headline feature. Hell, Schiit even says on the FAQ page for the Modi that “we think the Mimby sounds better”. Like they could release the Uno with the ESS chip and then explicitly say, “want a more musical sound? Upgrade to the Zen Air DAC”.
My claim is that the Zen DAC v2 doesn’t make sense from a value prop position anymore. But it could.
I totally agree that the Zen DAC with more power makes sense. They could drop the price if they ditched MQA as well.
Again the Zen Can is only an amp, and designed to go with the Air from what I can tell. Combined they are $300, and $100 more for the extra power is something that seems reasonable, or did when it came out.
The K5 seems built to challenge that, by having the features of the Zen DAC or Air, with the power of the Can.
I agree that portable gear is the cost effective way to get balanced output. Not to mention you are getting both DAC and amp solved in a single device. I am a big fan of the BTR5, and it is still one of the best value picks for an amp, and has plenty of power for my needs, but I am mostly an IEM user and only have a few good headphones.
Could you imagine if they integrate it with their app and add parametric EQ to it that would let you change the tuning to whatever IEM’s tuning in their graph database (like AutoEQ 2.0)? How could would that be (kind of like Q5k, but even better, as it would be basing on the fixed EQ of known IEM). I was hoping Qudelix would do something like that for their own QX-over IEMs to be honest
