Lotoo sent us a review unit in exchange for our honest assessment. Several months on, having put it through its paces with a wide and demanding range of transducers, it’s earned a permanent place in my listening rotation. Here’s why.
The PAW Gold legacy
There are companies that release a new flagship every eighteen months, whether they have something meaningful to say or not. And then there’s Lotoo.
Founded in 1999 and rooted in professional audio recording technology, Lotoo didn’t stumble into the consumer DAP market by accident. They arrived with intent. The original PAW Gold, launched in 2014, was the product of engineers who simply wanted to build the finest-sounding portable player they could, commercial considerations be damned.
Legend has it the device exists because Lotoo’s founder wasn’t satisfied with anything else on the market. That sounds like the kind of origin story that gets embellished over time, but if you’ve ever spent time with the original PAW Gold, you’d believe every word of it.
PAW Gold was a singular device. Quirky by modern standards — no touchscreen, a button-heavy interface inherited from their professional recorder lineage — but sonically it was something quite apart from the competition. Pure, clean, technically unimpeachable. The audiophile community noticed, even if the broader market didn’t. Cult status was achieved and enthusiastically maintained.
By 2018, the world had moved on enough that Lotoo felt it was time to modernise. PAW Gold Touch — the LPGT, as it became universally known — arrived with a proper touchscreen, Bluetooth, a 4.4mm balanced output, and the same uncompromising reference philosophy under the hood.
It quickly earned a reputation as one of the finest-sounding DAPs on the market, and remained a benchmark for neutrality, transparency and tonal accuracy for the better part of six years. Lotoo, to their credit, didn’t rush a successor. While other brands churned through flagships on an annual cycle, LPGT kept receiving firmware updates and quiet refinements. It aged with dignity.
PAW Gold Touch 2, officially styled as PAW GT2 (or GT2 for short), arrived in late 2024 at the same $3,200 price point as its predecessor. That price discipline alone deserves a moment of recognition in a market where flagship prices have become increasingly untethered from reality.
But GT2 isn’t just a modest refresh of a well-loved design. It’s a thorough, confident rethink of what a Lotoo flagship should do in 2026, and in almost every meaningful respect, it delivers.
Continue to GT2: a new reference
