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In Reply to: RE: Tannoy posted by AJ on October 08, 2016 at 16:13:35
It's kind of funny but I live in Hong Kong and wander into listening rooms and talk to some audiophiles from Hong Kong AND from Mainland China and they almost always say - yeah I won't buy that crap made in China. Man they even lose their own home market! To be fair there are some exceptions. The KEF LS-50 is the best two way standmount they have made in my opinion for both sound quality and build construction. They don't hold value because they're made in China though. But that's because of a biased market perhaps.
I've had my ASL Headphone amp for 16 years and works great. Line Magnetic has been faultless - pound for pound dollar for dollar difficult to beat by anything I've heard from the US. Granted some of these started in China so they have more of a vested interest over some company moving in to get cheap labor and a bunch of people who have never used a soldering iron in their life and crash course teach them for a month then leave.
I lived in Whenzhou China for a year (uggh there is 5 years of 3 packs a day I have to cleanse from my system) and when Papa Johns came in they had their US workers train the staff. Once the Americans left - the toppings were cut in half, there was no longer any soap or paper towels in the washrooms. Nor was there any soap in the mop buckets. Naturally we got food poisoning and never went back. Even McDonald's the bastions of Clean for a fast food joint didn't clean - that funny tasting ice-cream cone - was it milk? Or was it that they never cleaned the machines? McDonald's was my first job and every single night from 1am to 5am that entire store was cleaned completely - hospitals would be impressed. I was. I would walk into competing chains and thing man you'd get fired at McDonald's for that. Granted this was way back in 1990 so things may have changed.
But the market does this to themselves - they keep buying it. So don't. If you want the hand made loudspeaker where the company tests every single unit before it goes out the door - and I mean tests the drivers and the finished units by actually sitting down and listening to ALL of them then you have to pay for that. You want to support local - stop going to the likes of welfare queens like Walmart.
But having said that - when you have plenty of money it's easy to poo poo made in China, eating at McDonald's, and shopping at Walmart. When you have money it's easy to spend the $5k on the speaker over the $1500 KEF or spend $40 for a hamburger at Gordon Ramsey's, or buy $300 belts over an entire week's worth of clothing including 2 belts from Walmart.
And since there is now vast vast wealth inequality where basically most are "poor" I can't blame KEF or Tannoy going to China. They can sell their $1500 speaker - they won't sell it at $3500 which it would probably cost if it were made in the US. And if they don't sell they go under.
But the iceberg has hit and we're already sinking.
Follow Ups:
its not only price why audio is not selling, current generation don't give a crap and spend their $$$ elsewhere.....
Edits: 10/09/16
That is quite true. The internet is a powerful beast. Back in the 70s what was there? Most people had a crappy tube TV of a big 27 inches and maybe a remote with 15 channels. And the quality of television was generally crap compared to the offerings today at l;east in the drama categories. So what else was there? The Stereo was the only other form of home entertainment.
You could largely make this case through the 80s - only VHS and Beta but so what - you rented a movie or two for the weekend - that's 4 hours - what to do with the rest of the time.
But today - you have movies and TV on demand - all the way back to the Honeymooners if you like and movie channels and in Asia - terabytes of TV and film - you can download seasons of shows in Bluray quality in about 6 minutes.
And the games. The video games can't be underestimated as a huge entertainment time sucker. As ridiculous as I find it watching all the Hong Kongers out walking the streets at 10pm hunting PokeMons I suppose at least they are getting some exercise. And the thing about music is that most all the current pop music sounds exactly the same. So why would anyone buy it? They don't here - they download it for free. They have X dollars - they will buy the games because they can't steal the games - but music? It's all on youtube for free or on a torrent.
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