Chinese Class A SS

+2, excellent posts, gentlemen.

So much of North American and European high-end audio actually gets built in China, which the western companies normally keep that under their hat. And that’s not the budget or value brands I’m talking about.

Interestingly, my Chinese friends have told me China has actually become too expensive for manufacturing (not just audio, anything and everything), and they’ve already begun the shift to other locales en masse. Get ready to for production in places you would have never thought

@charles1dad yes, you're mostly right.

Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Africa, and depending on how the politics go, Cambodia and Myanmar / Burma.

Hard (at least, for me) to believe, but Vietnam supposedly has already become too expensive

I find the charge of stealing a circuit design interesting.

For example, when it comes to tube amplifiers, but a handful of designs exist, with almost all developed between the 1930s and 1950s. Beyond the SET designs from Western Electric and that ilk, with an exception or three, push-pull tube amplifiers use the Dynaco (taken from the guitar industry), Mullard (99% of modern offerings), or Williamson circuit, the latter two offered to inspire creating products in the audio market. Same goes for power supplies.

When a company claims their circuit is proprietary, or its developed some exciting "innovations", it simply means they’ve added / removed / tried a different value part to what’s long existed, and felt it worked or sounded better. Look at the schematic (which no one provides anymore), and it will employ one of the aforementioned classic designs.

I’ll use a recipe as an analogy. A restaurant or home cook may have a recipe for chicken marsala or whatever you care to imagine. Their particular interpretation varies in the inclusion / ratio of ingredients and implementation. Does any rational person challenge or denigrate them for it?