Budget Chinese Tube amps - any good?


In the midst of searching for a budget tube amp. Lots of chinese made models keep popping up. The price on these amps are often really low and would give someone like me a chance to try the tube sound for cheap.

Do you guys have any good experiences with them?

Reason I'm asking is that I hear many conflicting experiences online on each amp. Some say their amps are really good, some say they are really bad - each model might have 5 good reviews and 5 bad reviews. I guess this is par for course with audio, where subjectivity is the rule of the game. However, chinese amps tend to have the largest disparity of opinions.

The models I've read up on so far are: Mingda amps, Miniwatt N3, Yaqin amps etc.
milesandcoltrane

Showing 4 responses by wolf_garcia

Beware of anybody claiming to have "golden" ears...they're more likely to be guilded tin.
I bought a new factory modded/upgraded Jolida JD502p power amp some months ago and it's working out really well...it was amazingly inexpensive. It's a powerful sweet sounding amp (with the XLR inputs that I wanted) for about half the cost of what a comparable amp by ANY other brand, Chinese or domestic, offers, as well as being a great vehicle for my endless tube rolling fetish.
I spoke to Michael Allen on the phone a couple of times when calling Jolida about my amp...minor questions regarding KT120s and like that...and it appears that Maryland Jolida is doing very well in spite of what might be a long, drawn out litigation with the "other Jolida"...all the Jolida guys are accessable, helpful people, including Allen, who often answers the phone and doesn't mind chatting about this stuff.
If a well made Chinese based amp isn't expensive, you can assume the markup isn't enormous. Besides...our great country was built on slave labor so there's a tradition there (joking, but still a truth albeit a sad one). Apparently, unlike MAC and others, Michael Allen (Jolida) started a new factory a while back with much higher wages and far better working conditions than nearly any other Chinese factory, all to insure production of a higher quality product at a reasonable price.