Thanks for sharing. Fortunately I remain happy with my SA-1 (except for capacitor noise that's pretty evident at night) and don't really consider it warm or dark

When I had both Spotify and Tidal, my Chromecast/Bluetooth streamers would auto-resume and sometimes I forgot which service it was playing from.

I always thought Spotify sounded worse, but it may be that Spotify plays at a lower volume.

Personally no. His iem list is alright but his headphone list is so crazy different from my own experience and tastes, especially when it comes to comments on timbre/detail/refinement

Seems you got down-voted for claiming oratorys profiles are computer generated, but your conclusion is absolutely spot on. In-ear FR varies depending on ear and skull shape/size, and sensitivities to particular frequencies are amplified compared to listening to speakers.

One needs to understand what's being adjusted in each EQ profile, instead of blindly applying them (although it's not surprising in an era of auto-everything). Your personal EQ settings should always be tuned to fit your ears and preferences.

For international customers IMO the real issue is not the relatively high failure rate of these amps (although I think it's a valid question why such simple and low wattage devices fail at all), but the fact that Drop only ships replacements upon receiving and verifying the faulty unit. This takes about 2 months (from personal experience, way before the pandemic). Drop is also unable to provide any technical support or parts replacement, so you wouldn't even be able to pay them to fix your unit.

Between this and the Drop panda which similarly died randomly after a few months (to Drop's credit, in both cases they accepted a return and full refund), I decided never to buy any Drop electronics. Sure miss the massdrop days when they were offering all sort of interesting stuff from established manufacturers at good discounts.