Fair enough, but I think that a bit much is made about the whole 5 Watts thing and the way it was measured.
Yes and no.
At issue here are a few things.
Like, the way iFi approach to marketing shifted from honest, customer focused and taking if necessary the high road on popular but pointless topics and doing what resulted in a better product, if less fashionable, the kind of integrity and customer focus the brand was build upon, to more and more focused on fashion and "fluff" instead of fundamentals.
At one point the people behind iFi and AMR sat together and agreed to have among other rules to greenlight products that they would be products we would not only be happy, but eager to buy with our own money AND feel we got good Value for money. Non of current iFi product would have passed this test.
To me the Diablo and it's history are a key example. The Diablo and Diablo 2 are products that are realistically worse in many areas of Sound quality and objective performance to the iDSD micro they derive and unnecessarily so and they are equally technically outdated without good reason. I'm always one to champion "old but excellent" over fashion, if it delivers the goods.
The Diablo (no comments on "2", not my design, if still heavily derived from my work) for example should have stayed single ended. It would have had enough output power for anything, the change to balanced added zip to performance, but cynically panders to a false belief that "balanced is better" and seeks to monetise this.
The Diablo and many later iFi products should have switched from DSD1793 to PCM1795, the work to have this sound better, perform better at a nominal extra cost was already done. Of course, the DSD1793 is better than most think from looking at paper.
Given the way crossfeed and bass boost are implemented in the iDSD micro and derivatives that retain it (and other ifi products); that is without extra circuitry added except a few resistros and capacitors if ensbled, but instead wrapped into the design transparently; there was no point to remove these features, except cynical pandering to those who falsely believe "features make bad sound" and seeks to monetise this.
Instead of spending some extra development time to sort out once and for all the volume control issue (and go with the solution from the x-Series which was a very long hanging fruit) an obsolete and problematic solution was intentionally retained, in order to turn out more products, not better products and then and seeks to monetise this.
The end result is an unnecessarily suboptimal product with little to recommend it over the original source (iDSD micro) and lost useful features being marketed with questionable numbers as premium product and top of the line.
The Diablo is not a bad product, just, it is a product that should have been much better and less expensive and if added to with advertising and marketing that at least raises questions... Nuff sed.
Well it seems to me that current iFi/AMR (it seems AMR has died anyway) has gone half circle, to be the polar opposite of what it was created to deliver to customers, has jettisoned all the ideals and integrity and and has turned strictly into a means to extract the most profit for customers without much care for the products customers receive, instead of giving them fair value and product that gives them value for money, great sound and satisfaction.
Perhaps that is what it takes to be successful. To me, it's a sad outcome to the venture I gave up much to be part of, but also learned much, had an amazing time, was allowed to realise dreams and hopefully give joy to many people. But hey, that's just me. And I'm fine anyway.
Let people judge the value of what current iFi tries to sell them and how on the merits of the products, the customer service and approach to customers and ethics as it stands now.
If the product, customer service and company ethics makes you happy, be happy.
And that is all I have to say about that!
Thor
