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One big difference

All of the "Class D" speakers are made in China with slave labor, no OSHA, and no EPA. The workers are starving peasants recruited from the countryside and they send their $3 a day salary back to their village to help feed their families. The workers don't even have dust masks, let alone respirators while spraying toxic compounds as a finish. They often live in fenced compounds with razor wire at the top, work six 12 to 14 hour days, eat in cafeterias, and sleep in dorms. The toxic solvents are either dumped in the gutter or in a ditch. The workers are dying slowly of liver and/or brain damage.

I know because I visited two different speaker factories in mainland China around the turn of the millennium. I've seen it with my eyes. Is it better now? I don't know. Remember a few years ago when of the hundreds of thousands of workers that lived a similar way at FoxConn, manufacturer of Apple products, that there were over a dozen suicides in the first few months one year? The bad publicity made Apple raise their wages from $1 a day to $3 a day.

So when you are buying products made in China, it is at the expense of human suffering and disease, much like the plantation owners in this country growing tobacco and cotton using slaves 150 years ago.

The best way to understand this is to just look at the Vandersteen speaker line up. They still make the Models One and Two. Twenty years ago they were something like $695 and $1295 per pair. They are still made in the same factory. I don't know if they still use the same Vifa drivers, as Vifa has been bought and sold at least 3 times since then. For many years Vifa production was moved to China, but some of if may have moved back to Europe, I'm not sure. At any rate the Model One sells for the $1295 that the Model Two used to sell for and the Model Two is at least $2000.

At one time the Model Two was likely class B. I don't know what rating it has now, but it is almost certainly as good as ever. Then there are more sophisticated models with more sophisticated technology and more expensive drivers and more expensive cabinet technology. The Treo which I believe replaced the $3500 Model Three is something like twice that price.

Inflation is something invented by the banks (specifically the private banks that comprise the Federal Reserve) that is designed to transfer wealth from the working class to the already rich. Yet we take it for granted, not realizing that "saving for retirement" doesn't work and all the banks do is make money investing your "savings" in the markets (or worse yet, derivatives). When you get your money out, it is worth 1/10 of what you put in, due to compound inflation. Go watch the film, "The Big Short" - but only if you are prepared to get angry.

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