Thing is this was asked by Amir himself way back
For those ethically/environmentally inclined, China produces most of it's electrical power from coal, which is cheap but very polluting and affects the whole planet. Also, shipping goods overseas generally means large cargo ships, and because international waters have no environmental regulations, cargo ships burn an extremely inexpensive and polluting fuel - bunker fuel - which is solid at room temperature and requires a separate system on the ships to heat up the fuel so it will flow as a liquid. Count all the cargo ships together and treat them like a country and they are the 7th largest polluter in the world. Respiratory diseases are so high near large ports everywhere in the world because of the exhaust from the ships impacts people living near the port. Also, in China there are very few environmental regulations and dumping from industry has polluted a significant amount of the groundwater there, which is causing many increased health problems for the people of China since that water is used for crops, food production, and drinking water with very little oversight.
My RME ADI-2 DAC has crossover noise from low to high in Auto mode and it cost 3X as much.
It does push down to click. It is smooth when turning, no detents.
in a world where the dx3 pro+ is $200 and the Ex5 is $350, i struggle to justify its price/performance but it looks cool
I must admit the lure & promise of perfect channel balance is a good one! But I just don't perceive any such issues with my potentiometer in my JDS Labs Atom Amp.
Kudos to you for measuring it. I bought my Atom Amp sometime in late 2019 or early 2020 - re relevance on timing of quality control improvements. After doing a bit of research it looks like the JDS Labs Atom Amp volume pots were hand-matched from May 2020 onwards, so it looks likely I probably didn't get a hand-matched one, yet channel balance has not been a detectable problem for me:
www.audiosciencereview.com
Issues with pots can ruin an otherwise great experience. E.g. my Element II has issues from 6 to 9 o'clock, with one side being completely silent from 6 to 7 o'clock. Going digital is the right decision for the Element III, especially at the price. It prevents unhappy buyers and probably also many support cases.
I ordered mine beginning of May 2020.
Fair enough, I have absolutely no doubt the Atom is an excellent amp, but the original comment was about someone that felt the "performance" of the Element 3 was "barely acceptable". I just feel there might be a bit too much emphasis on the Sinad at 1k, it's the first thing we see the main charts are ranked like that, etc. My point was why a performance metric differential that show rigorously inaudible distortion and noise could be just barely ok, where some other measurements shows accomplishments that can shows perfection in some place that the benefit can, at least potentially be heard is ignored in the comparison, is to me a bit misguided. I do think that for many "performance" equate "Sinad at 1K" It's obviously not that.
Yeah, the performance of this Element III is good, it doesn't need better SINAD numbers.
The “audible improvement” statement in the blog post was in reference to better channel matching due to the digital encoder that replaced the analog potentiometer in the Element II.
Not only for sensitive IEMs but also for people who listen at low to moderate levels in unusually quiet environments. The Element III's SNR of 85 dB @ 50 mV is "good" but not "great".
