Right on point. It's a difficult topic to navigate in. Most of what you buy in stores are the name, royalties, and R&D of digital circuits and a complex new IoT

Right on point. It's a difficult topic to navigate in. Most of what you buy in stores are the name, royalties, and R&D of digital circuits and a complex new IoT interface. For true audiophile gear you pay for them to individually test each and every component. Only select the ones that match, and for the overall circuitry to work as expected. All that manual labor to get the last 5% is very expensive, and completely irrelevant for the vast majority of people. They're going to stream their music from an inferior source anyway.