Pulling a fast one

Walk down the streets of Shanghai and you will quickly get an education on the state of high end audio in the USA. On a street you will find many a hi fi shop. These shops carry amps, preamps and CD players with unique designs and brands you never heard of. Your stroll will make the latest hi fi rag’s “recommended components” a kin to hospital food – generic, lack –luster and downright boring.

What is even more interesting is that you will find brands like Cayin, Xindak, the “Spark” amplifiers that look mysteriously like the Prima Donnas and a host of other products that look mysteriously like a brand that you just saw advertised. These brands are often offered at a fraction of the price that they are sold for in the USA, and except for a voltage winding on the transformer, are identical to those offered in the USA. However, they don’t have the mark up that USA distribution.
Now, being from Chicago, I can completely understand the “one hand washes another” paradigm. And I too, long to play in this game of “advertise in your magazine, review in your magazine” . And while my Heinz ketchup anticipation awaits me, I am going to do it without marking up my items or such other nonsense as part of the game. Only because I know that all of you will blow me off quicker than a Lou Dobb’s exit.

While I have complained about the high cost of audio in the past, I just cannot complain about equipment that is hand-crafted. Equipment from Audio Research, Mark Levinson, Macintosh, Conrad Johnson etc.. may very well be worth the money – they are collector’s items. If you are looking for a hand crafted piece and want to pay the mark up – then please go right ahead.

We are not trying to compete with those items or manufacturers. We are trying to give people a taste of those components, at a fraction of the costs. Recently, there have been some items that are in the less than 1K range on our website that are just outstanding audio values and are above and beyond what you can get in the USA.

What frosts me is when something that you can buy in Shanghai is marked up by a distributor trying to pull a fast one. That is not buying audio, that is just plain dumb.