Denafrips 12 anniversary

just to be clear, my problem with denafrips and their direct selling partners is the greed aspect... they already have direct sales, zero dealers in usa and europe, yet they are doing all the crass marketing gimmicks which smacks of harvesting their customer base on the higher end given their recently established market recognition -- this has nothing to do with the fact they are chinese, it has everything to do with how they are playing the game

i suggest to folks to get a pontus, stop there, that is value sweet spot in everything they sell, don't get sucked into higher products, ddc's to make the dacs sound right, all that nonsense

Last year I was sucked into buying the Pontus Before the 12/17/21 price hike.

I did. Guess what. No hike. They have the game down. I sold the damn thing

and broke even. No more Denafrips for this buyer.

@jl1ny 

The Lampi sounded gorgeous but for the money I cannot get past the DIY build quality. The Dave left me scratching my head, how it has attained stardom is beyond my comprehension. 

In this scenario  I’ll opt for “sounded gorgeous “ every time. It seems there’s no middle ground with the Chord Dave. People either find them fantastic or highly over rated and overpriced. With DACs there’s genuinely something for everyone.

Charles

Yes now that we have a Gustard R26 for $1600 that sounds as good or better than my Terminator II, will Denafrips be forced to up its game in the lower price bracket gear war to stay competitive, or does it go upscale and try to compete with Chord or even MSB? I think in many ways it would be easier to use better parts and tighter tolerances etcetera than having to innovate and cost cut...

What Denafrips failed to see is that China labor costs are 4-5x less 

and they still want To read the higher $$ 

if anything with thus current economy they should have went up 10% at most