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As a minor audiophile I think a lot about how great ChiFi is. My desk setup is Sennheiser 650s and a Monoprice DAC/AMP but when I'm on the go, I use earbuds. Recently after somewhat being forced to swap to a phone with no aux I trialed AirPods and being thoroughly unimpressed I just bought a dongle and figured might as well grab some new wired KZs. $20 and they blow past $100 earbuds, and I have $50 Linsoul TIN T2s with quality you'd have to spend >$200 to get from a western brand. It's location, location, location. Shenzhen, so many components made there, easy to get everything needed for high-quality IEMs and sell them for very low margin but at very high volume. It's one of the areas where China has been killing it, and I'll be very eager when a ChiFi brand I know as well and regard as highly as KZ starts putting out high-end competitive headphones without the massive luxury tax.
I also know the bad side of business in China. Though now as I think about it, the environment that allows DeepSeek as you claim it, or better, allows KZ and ChiFi, will also have the worst of the examples. There's a lot of shitty Chinese manufacturing, but it's not the rule. We might earnestly say "Circumstantial and correctable socioeconomic factors."
I regularly use OpenAI products, ChatGPT and DALL-E and now Sora. There I often have to frame things so I don't trip the censors. What content restrictions does DeepThink have, if any? You say it pushes back. Is it going to chastise me for wrongthink? Is it going to misgender someone to stop a nuke? Will it call me the N-word? I remember charts from however many months back about the measurable "increase in stupidity" of western LLMs, and I've assumed that has everything to do with the combination of beating it senseless to condition it against wrongthink, and then compounding that by forcing it to phrase everything in lawyerspeak so they can't be sued. A capable team that isn't devoting significant manhours to forcing their pattern-recognition machine to not recognize patterns would surely blow past the ones who do.
The prose you linked is decent, it has consistent tone and content. It's not quality yet, it would be impressive if written by a high schooler. But it's not a high schooler, it's what they have today, and will only get better.
As someone deep in the chifi hole let me tell you that the impressive thing about chifi isn't the quality.
It's the competition and speed of improvement. The in-ear market is evolving at light speed, with brands releasing a new model every couple of months. They also went from a complete non-understanding of branding to throwing together bespoke packaging and cases, cables, tips and cleaning, and now even replaceable screw-on tuning nozzles.
And that's to say nothing about the panning-for-gold approach to tuning they used to have. Now the market is maturing and the west has found themselves not non-competitive, but at a complete loss when it comes to making the margins they used to make. They're lucky audio stuff tends to last a while and the really good stuff tends to hold its value.
The best IEM in the world would have cost you a couple thousand five years ago. Now you can get something with equivalent performance and detail, without accounting for personal preference in tuning, for less than half the price.
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Rest assured, R1 has its own problems with noticing patterns. It's just a different set of patterns that it's designed to ignore.
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