A valid one at that. I’ve mentioned my thoughts on this ordeal before. For the majority of sales, as DAC inplementations start to equalize in terms of performance due to OEM DAC chip makers. The only thing left in terms of competitive edge will eventually be everything except performance.
AMPs (especially power amps for speakers as well) are still safe from this ordeal it seems for a little while longer. Though if makers finally took the hint and start borrowing or attempt to implement their own versions of the sort of “diff” feed forward correction that THX has pioneered into the market, amps too may follow this trend as well. Though amps can always default to then offering more and more power(again mainly for speakers), so they still have some wiggle room in terms of squeezing people for their money on things other than distortion performance in the consumer mainstream market.
As you can see the trends upcoming - folks like Topping and SMSL aren’t sleeping on this. The DX7 Pro that should land in two months, already has Bluetooth 5.0 (a nearly useless feature from all the reading I’ve done when it comes to audio, aside from maybe non obstructed line of sight range being drastically increased, and support for LDAC codec). It comes also with both balanced XLR, and a 2.5mm balanced (don’t recall seeing this on anything other than DAPs). A small footprint especially with the feature set, etc...
Heck even this device the M300, its form factor itself is a manifestation of chasing something besides good performance. (That being the market for people who want devices that aren’t so wide as they are now).
It’s real nice and exciting time to be into audio at the moment (at least for headphones, I have no idea how along things are coming in the mainstream speaker world, though even they are seemingly starting to take risks with wireless more and more).