Denarips and Vinshine split

I whole heartedly disagree with anyone knocking Alvin Chee as a "middle man who adds no value".

He is one of the few middle men who has added tremendous value to me in the past. He is the one who set up US repair for Denafrips products, who instituted the 3 year transferrable warranty, who pushed for firmware updates, who created the videos on how to upgrade firmware and components , who has answered any and all emails requesting information/recommendations, and who fought hard to not have the never ending naming convention that was driving resale prices down.

He fought for those of us who own Denafrips products, and apparently lost. I have owned a bunch of Denafrips products (DACs, DDCs, amps, preamps; all purchased through Vinshine. Also LHY linear power supplies, and several friends with the Jay's CDT2 MKIII transports.

I will absolutely continue to follow Vinshine and Alvin, and have absolutely NO qualms about buying from him. What can be better than having a reliable partner for Chinese hi-fi, that stands behind them with integrity.

I agree with the positive comments for Alvin.  I've ordered a couple of things him and always pleased with service and support.  I am pleased with my T2 but if it comes time to upgrade I will probably look to him first before I go to Denafrips.

I very much doubt that anyone who’s actually had dealings with Alvin would have anything remotely negative to say about him. I wish him all the best going forward. 

@mbmi

I looked at the new LAIV dac.

It seems to me there will be a need for improvements in the design before I would even consider it. First, it has no AES input and that kind of hurts when you have 1k AES cable with nowhere to go. And most importantly there is no ext master clock connection. I understand it will recognize an external clock via I2s, but that's not enough, there are other components needing a master clock that are not I2s, like my Jay's cdt2-mk3, which by the way is connected via AES. Anyway thanks for the info as I was not aware of the LAIV dac but it just doesn't fit my system right now. It does have a nice remote though, and that was always to big miss with Denafrips.

Vinshine has been so much the front end of Denefrips that I really can't say I have a sense of the company without Vinshine. I have two Denefrips DACs and found Vinshine to be reliable and reasonable. If Denefrips is getting another distributor or going a DTC route I guess time will tell. I wouldn't have bought their gear from Ali Express/AliBaba; that seems too opaque for buying high-value items.

I wish Vinshine well. They have a good business model.