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In Reply to: RE: used Bryston or Wadia DAC posted by wood1 on June 05, 2015 at 17:53:36
You simply can't go by units you happen to see on the second hand market - there is a thing called sales volume. The more something sells the more of then you will see on the second hand market and Bryston sells a whole ton more than Wadia.
I see this argument all too often - yeah I am sure we all see more Ford's on the second hand market than Bentley and Bugatti as well. If you sell 100 times more units you are going to see them on the second hand market - indeed if it's only 4 times as much and not 100 times as much then it's probably doing really well.
The link below is one machine investigated one machine caught. If they do it once who is to say they're not always doing it? This industry has a lot of audio-jewelry issues where small companies are basically adding nice casework (and mostly ONLY nice casework) and then charging top dollar for it. Or they add some $50 of bits and charge idiotic money.
Bryston is bigger - they have economies of scale working for them and in theory should be able to build the same quality as smaller outfits for much less money. They don't need to rebadge Marantz/Philips machines - they can buy a transport but they have their own designers implement the machine. SO their transport used the Philips L1210 mechanism - Audio Note uses the same Philips L1210 transport mechanism and both of them will sound entirely different from one another because each companies designs the rest of the unit. Wadia buys an entire Marantz machine and puts it inside their own casework and charges 5+ times the money. Theta Data Universal did the same thing - took an ENTIRE Philips Laserdisc player - case included - and stuck it inside their own sheet metal and charged $5000 for a $399 Philips player.
Unfortunately they found a reviewer to rave about it and seduce people out of wasting thousands of dollars for a $399 machine (could have bought 12 of them instead).
Chinese companies have also been building gear for many years and American and European companies bought them up and put their own labels on them. Which is why I find it funny that there is so much anti-Chinese sentiment when a lot of stuff is just re-badged Chinese gear from over a decade ago. It is not actually always Chinese knocking off US gear - it's US gear re-badging Chinese made gear - or Japanese gear.
Follow Ups:
I do not dispute your argument regarding a company basically repackaging an OEM design and exponentially inflating the retail price as a poor value.
Regarding Wadia however, the model you give in your example was early in their development, circa 1990. Their Model 7 Transport, an even earlier design, also used a rebadged and repackaged Teac assembly. This practice was not repeated as the company matured.
To the best of my knowledge, and I seriously challenge you on this, it was never done with their DAC's which used proprietary algorithms, filtration (or lack of it) and output circuitry. I know that all the models I owned which I listed in my prior post were uniquely Wadia, except for the laser/sled hardware already mentioned.
This of course may be true. Which is fine and it may be the other device was a Wadia knock-off - this was also at least a decade back which is why I can't find it on the net and I am at work where I have trouble finding stuff on the net as it is.
I have seen a lot living in Hong Kong where I see products for 1/4 the price here that are not knock-off but basically unpainted versions of brands selling in Europe and the west. Wasn't there also a Chinese duplicate of a Levinson something or other - Red Rose or Red Wine or something like that? This is just the tip of the ice-berg.
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