I see a ton of Chinese company bashing going on in this thread. I think there are many misconceptions that people really should understand.
With the global chip shortages going on companies are forced to use whatever chips they have available in order to produce products. This may mean that while the DAC chip is available that does not mean that every single choke, capacitor, vrm and other control chip may be available.
So sometimes parts are swapped. Also due to the lack of Supply there are alternate suppliers which may be supplying lower quality chips that manufacturers may not even know about.
This can cause failures down the line that cause problems with Brand reputation.
Considering the fact that Chinese audio products cover most feature sets, most price ranges and most "nice to haves" as well as good design; they are undoubtedly selling many more units VS other brands.
Mainly I mean topping & smsl.
However I would say that Topping is higher quality VS SMSL just due to how they do designs & QC. They are more vertically integrated and focus on specific market segments. SMSL uses many contracted designs and sells everything under the sun. They also replace products very frequently, unlike Topping.
I personally have my first Topping D30, A30 & the original DX7 which I just retired from my main daily audio stack after 5 years. Now it will go to run my speakers in my main room.
I broke the USB input... Otherwise it works fine still... Even if the oled screen is faded now after 5 years of daily use.
I have other friends with Topping products who have no issues, D50, DX3Pro, D10, A90D, etc.
Schiit on the other hand doesn't deserve to be supported ever. It is a trash tier company run by horrible people. They scammed the industry for years and pay off admins on headfi to push their narrative. It's literally how I found this site after I was pushed out of headfi for discovering flaws in Schiit USB interfaces. They decided to silence me instead of man up to the design flaws.
They still sell scam products like Modi Multibit (but it's out of stock right now) and crap like Yggdrasil.
JDS labs on the other hand is a great company with honest people. They are a small company however and don't have many products.
So if you are in the market for entry level; Atom stack has you covered.
Otherwise there is the Element.... That is it. It's good, but falls behind other products in things like balanced interconnect, MQA (some of us use it), amp input (dropped on element 3), multiple headphone outputs, IEM modes, etc and it's $500.
Otherwise what else is American? Benchmark? The prices of their stuff is very high. Also regardless of where stuff is built; the chips come from the same places and issues with chip quality can be an issue for any of these companies.
So it makes it harder to support other companies too.
All in all I don't see much of a reason to bash "all Chinese audio devices" because of some isolated incidents or specific model design flaws.
