I have noted a number of warnings about cheap Chinese fake cables on this site but curiosity led me to the Aliexpress site where I found a number of presumably fake big name cables from predominantly Cardas, Nordost and Siltech at about 15% of the USA or Australian price. I found Cardas Clear Light interconnects at about US$100 and decided what the heck let's give them a try at that price. Before buying I asked the seller the daft question as to whether they were genuine and got the reply that they were an OEM and constructed the interconnects from genuine Cardas cables and connectors. They arrived in a plastic bag rather than the Cardas box , not a great start but the cables looked real, and when connected, much to my surprise, they sounded really good. After 100hours or so burn in they sounded great and better than the Nordost Quatre Fils I had been using. I then took them to an Australian hi end dealer who sold real Cardas and asked rather ingenuously whether my cables were the real deal. The dealer would not commit but agreed to compare them to the real thing on a set up costing at a guess around A$100,00. Neither I nor the sales person could tell any difference so he then tried them against the Cardas Clear. Then there was some difference, not extreme but subtle, and certainly IMO not worth the price difference even if you bought the genuine Cardas Clear Light. So are these cables really fake and even if they are given my experience they are well worth a try. Maybe I'll try Nordost Odin or Siltech 770i next.
The origin of manufacturing is irrelevant to the discussion.
If a knockoff sound as good as genuine it may be genuine but pushed out the back door by employees trying to pad a paycheck. Theft of property rights is often the norm in China and genuine R&D gets robbed of cashflow that furthers more R&D.
That is what matters. Are we supporting the efforts of producers and their employees and other shareholders or are we supporting thievery?
I didn't cheat the recording industry by taping my friends records and buying knockoff or B-Stock or product picked up from a manufacturer's floor sold as the real deal still costs the original manufacturer his due, whether insanely priced or otherwise.
For some crazy reasoning in this blog,Americans as a people are elitist. There once was a time in American history that we fought to produce our own goods free from British rule. Fast forward 1975 or so,some billionaire said it cost too much to manufacture automobiles in the U.S. Enter the Honda Accord. And they haven't looked back. Americans whose incomes can support "Authorized resellers " can't fathom something being copied and sold as legit but aren't these same people making 90-98% of all the products in our homes? Start looking at country's of manufacture origin. Nothing is "made in America "" truly. Look at all the brands that to stay in the game had to resort to "Chinese " manufacturers. We all should stop buying any products that are not made here but we have gone way too far to ever return to those days. So if a supposed " knock-off" satisfies your audio orgasm bust it with the best of them because in all honesty the final judge is the person spending his/ her hard earned money on the things they feel complete they're audio systems to their liking.
With a quick lookup just now, I see Nordstrom Odin 1 cables msrp at over $16K, $22K and $29K for standard lengths. $200 is some kind of deal. What kind, I don't know.
Last week I received a 1m "Nodost Odin 1" from China. It looked and sounded good right out of the well wrapped box. After a few hours it sounded very good.
So I placed an order yesterday for a 2m version for $200. I'm a believer, at least in this case, and the 2-3 week shipping time is the only disadvantage. XSSH is the company, on aliexpress.com.
The thing is this is not high end electronic stuffs. That might be hard to make a good copy. This is only a cable. How hard will it be to locate the source material? I don’t think any of these high end brand make their own copper. Audioquest buys copper from Cardas to make their speaker cables. Its easy to find a place in China that sell good cooper, plated goods....etc. So basically making a highend speaker cables, interconnect, digital coaxial is extremely easy. These China factory can absolutely make good stunning cables which is same quality as the Nordost, Audience...etc. By using the top notch material inside. They just need to wrap with the nice package outside. Then it will look exactly like the real thing. And they do sound extremely good. You can’t tell the difference at all. So why bother spending $10 grants on a highend speaker cable instead of $300.
China has been infiltrating just about every single industry and manufacturing sector out there, including audio. Rather than get their brilliant people to R&D products that they refine over the course of decades, they steal technologies, designs, inventions and methods.
It's disgusting. Every company that has a factory in China is getting ripped off. Then they flood a marketplace with cheaper alternatives to put the legitimate manufacturers out of business. They've done this already with clothing, electronics and medications, for instance.
And this OP wants to ignore all that, and say, yeah, maybe it's stealing, but hey, this one fake cable sounds better than the other one. You can go get bent, fella.
I don't own any counterfeit gear.& don't agree that anyone should support counterfeit goods that are trying to be passed off as the real thing.
However, I also don't have any issue with someone reverse engineering a cable and offering their version of it as long as they aren't treading on anyone's patent, logo, etc. I wouldn't hesitate to purchase a quality copy of a once well regarded item as long as it wasn't counterfeited and sold as legitimate. Nothing illegal or unethical in that.
At the same time I don't believe for a minute the argument that someone purchasing a $200 Odin copy on Aliexpress is somehow taking away a legitimate sale of a real Nordost Odin cable. Anyone looking to hook up their $100k speakers to their DarTzeel amps isn't going to balk at another $25k in cabling and would most likely not even consider it.
I don't see anything on Aliexpress these days that says to me I can't
tell the difference by just comparing the two visually. Many of the
copies on offer there are of earlier technology as well or, more often, permutations of that technology & no longer
being offered for sale by the original manufacturer. You aren't really fooled by that little piece of wood that says Odin on that IC are you?
And how about all the dubious gear & claims that the Belts & other shamans have been peddling for ages? Expensive little stick on dots or $4k record clamps made from some dark exotic wood anyone? I'll bet the OP is correct in that many of those cables probably do sound very good. They can be sold inexpensively because they don't have that same infrastructure, dealer and advertising budget to support. Just don't try to pass it off as the real thing and don't steal IP.
I am truly surprised at some of the responses here. Whether anyone in any geography can make a decent product is not really the issue. I know for a fact that legitimate firms across the globe are capable of quality manufacturing. And if those manufacturers market and sell using their own IP and brand- All good.
The issue is IP and brand equity theft-profiting off of another’s earned reputation and technology. Those of you in favor of this, I assume you are ok with having your identity stolen, your credit rating tarnished, and your personal reputation trashed? I will buy cheaply made items when it suits me, but I won’t knowingly participate in theft. Call me Pollyanna.
I wouldn’t use a Chinese product as a boat anchor if I could help it. I don’t want to get into all the reasons- I know there are good people everywhere - just helps me breath easier. Sometimes it’s nearly impossible to avoid, I understand that- I’m not a Luddite, but in general I avoid them like the plague. YMMV.
True, I only questioned of the material (wire) being as advertised, since no brand name. But you are correct, many factories sell their commissioned (extras) genuine products under no-name, cheaper.
bill_k....they all came from the same ovens, That oven is from Hong Kong! All manufactures that don’t make their own cables, are manufactured in HK. To me it’s all about money and cheaper labor. Period!
While there may be a handful of cases where sellers of these fake cables are selling seconds or even alternate runs from the same factory, the vast majority are nothing but replicas which are made to look like the real brand’s product but actually have nothing similar in construction materials, design, or quality. Some may be good and others bad, but you have no way of knowing what you'll actually be getting other than it will likely have some similarities in appearance with the brand name product.
The quality of what they are selling, and the fact that they are using other manufacturers names are two separate issues. Those other companies have spent time and money to get their names recognized, wether or not you are a believer in their “snake oil”. In this country it is illegal to use another’s name, and i doubt those companies would want to spend endless money and time trying to get remedy in the Chinese court system. They might win in the end, but is the cost associated gaining them more, or costing them more. I have no doubts that the cables have huge margins in them, margins that the Chinese are willing to forgo, and have fewer levels of overhead to cover, so even if they were identical, they can sell for less. What they should do is create an their own marketing, and at those prices I bet they’d find plenty of buyers, which might force the big names to figure out how to be more competitive themselves.
In 2014 I was asked to consult with the Italian Mondo company which specialises in making the best synthetic running tracks in the world
It's an area they absolutely dominate - having won the contracts to build the last 7 Olympic Tracks
Their attention to detail is superb & we were getting our regional track produced by the exact crew that lay the last 4 Olympic Tracks
It is a 6 week process & I got to know the team very well so our club took them to Perths top seafood restaurent as a mark of appreciation for what they had done for local sport
The head engineer told us the story of building Beijing's Olympic Track
Mondo gave the Chinese a very good contract rate but in turn Mondo were signed up to build 100 tracks arround China
The primary Mondo team worked on the Olympic Stadium & assigned 2 Mondo engineers to oversee the 1st 10 of their regional tracks
All was going well until Mondo reps noticed work had started on 30 tracks without supervision by Mondo
By the time the Olympic Tracs were finished Mondo sent their top crew to go round the Chinese Copy Mondo tracks to fully diagnose the issue
Apparently the early all Chinese Tracks were utter crap
Legal issues ensued & the Chinese paid a suitable fine but continued to build the balance of the 100 tracks with their own teams - manufacturing the weaved rubber for the track, laying a bitumen compound base that can't warp over time or the track becomes illegal for competition
My friend, the chief engineer from Mondo checked out a few of the latter tracks at the Games
He said after about 30 completed tracks he absolutely could not tell the difference between the genuine Mondo versions & a Chinese copy
I'm not saying buy Chinese but don't underestimate their forging skills or the intellegence behind this type of swindle
All the best
I do love my 2 pair of Kharma interconnects but sadly a bargain $1500 ebay purchase on the 2nd pair tuned out to be fake
Yes there is an audible difference - but only a touch of high end harshness on some female vocalists
Certainly no more than 5% but in a world of purity - it hurts
Yes, contrary to one of the posts above. If a company builds a crappy product and sells it for a high price with ridiculous claims, that’s one level, and should eventually sort itself out in the free market. If an overseas company builds an out and out counterfeit with a famous name attached, that's an entirely different category. They’re criminally trading on that established brand, and also effectively cheapening it with their deceptive practice. The idea that there’s even a thread trying somehow to quantify this is offensive. Counterfeiters are thieves, there’s no candy coating it. L.
I wonder how many of these threads are just trying to market Chinese knock offs?
When you buy an Audioquest(or whatever brand) knock off, then that is a sale that prevents Audioquest from doing business. When enough of those illegitimate sales occur, Audioquest has to lay off Americans who market, distribute and sell their cables.
Then they have to spend less in the American economy on advertisements and such as they cut back. Multiply this by 1 million different companies that made the mistake of getting their products manufactured in China, and you begin to see how China is dismantling the American economy, and pocketing the profits.
I have genuine AQ HDMI Carbon and AQ HDMI Mocha (similar to Coffee). I purchased an AQ HDMI Vodka from China to compare to these two cables. Video aside cause it is very difficult to distinguish differences and all three to me look very similar, the Vodka sounded more dynamic and had more discernible impact in the lower frequencies than the Carbon and was very close to the Mocha with DBS pack, which had slight edge in dynamics. This is what I would expect if Vodka was genuine based on AQ price points on these cables. Physically, the cable itself looks genuine, but the HDMI connectors appear to be either poorly assembled outside of AQ factory or discarded by AQ quality control and somehow found its way on the open market. The packaging at first may appear genuine, but the overall colors seem slightly muted when compared to several AQ boxes I have and missing #6 bullet point in English on the back of the box. Overall, I would say the sound quality of this Vodka cable is surprising for not being a “genuine” AQ approved product.
I read the op and decided to give some Odins cables a try (one spade and the other a biwire bananas) since I've been looking for some cables, anyway.
How will they compare to the originals? No clue; will never know as those things crazy expensive. I'll compare them, maybe, to my A+ Silver Ovals. Maybe not. If the Chinese cables sound good in my system, and I end up liking them, who cares really?
Since many legitimate audio components are made in China how does one know what is legit and what is a copy? Some manufacturers make a legitimate item for a company but the manufacturer will sell seconds or even extra production runs out the back door.
So what is real and how do you buy only quality legitimate audio components from China or even Amazon and other legitimate storefronts who have been caught selling bogus components?
While you may wonder if a deeply discounted item is a fake or is a second or is even from excess production or you may have determined that you are not going to be a victim of exceessive or greedy profit margins how do you know how to proceed?
Every overseas product in demand has potential charlatans. We gave up legit quality made products when we sought after cheap or lesser quality overseas. That is the cost to lost manufacturing businesses in the State. While there are good producers outside of the US there are also scumbags.
BTW. Some here and those at other forums believe there are also scumbags designing bogus claims and products here in the States or the UK or elsewhere and thus, is a "fake" really a fake if the science behind the item is bogus?
Who is to say a knockoff is of lesser quality than a legitimate component, especially if the "legitimate" component is audio voodoo?
The final arbitrator of anything audio are your own ears.
Just another thought for those trying to buy the real item but wanting to save some money.
Do a search like the following to see whether an item is legit or not:
krell cryo-196 power cable -ebay -aliexpress
In this example, I found almost no one selling the item once ebay and Aliexpress are left out of the search. This would suggest that Krell Cryo 196 power cable are probably fakes or knockoffs since there is little to no seemingly legitimate online sales.
This is a hobby and lifestyle folks don’t get all twisted about it. I’ve had my products "faked" by several companies here in the states as well as over seas. At first I was offended and wanted justification, then I realized it’s all a part of life.
I don’t see the "fake" products as any more unethical as the people way over-charging for products that are poor performers dressed up.
mg
too many people come to audio forums with a bad mood to begin with, that tells me they aren’t really listening to the message of the music
@zalive, sadly I found your words to be all too true. I still remember all the hassle of trying to source genuine high purity OFC copper speaker cables on eBay.
After trying to trawl through the maze of varying prices and some non too convincing pictures and fine print descriptions I gave up went to Amazon UK and read through the reviews there which eventually led me to some transparent sleeved BasicLine15 metre 2x2 5mm set from Germany (DCSk) claiming to be 99.99% saueurstoffreie.
I have no real way of knowing whether they are the genuine article but they are reassuringly heavy and do have that reddish copper colour.
By the way, beware of Sonarquest. I found out they don't stick to their own specification - they confirmed to me they now use berylium bronze instead of pure copper for EU Schuko plugs, yet they didn't update the spec on their web page. They claim they use cryo treatment, however after finding out the false spec I'm not sure I trust them. Furthermore, they call this a 'material upgrade', which is a ridiculous claim - any bronze is far inferior to pure copper.
So when you find out the brand owner downgrades its products and keeps false specs, what can you expect from fake or no-brand market? That they keep their word?
On the good side, I checked Viborg plugs too and underneath the plating is red copper (I cannot check the purity of course). There are occasional discounts on those plugs and when it's so it's a good value product. Also, all my recommendations to genuine Star Line RCA from ebay, this is high quality stuff.
Korea has counterfeit products too. Fake products are made in the the US, and many other countries. Counterfeit products have been produced for thousands of years all over the world. Demand is what causes supply.
A lot of the the wire and connectors sold today by US cable manufacturers come from China. US retailers assemble them and mark the price up by up to 1000%. Keep buying USA cables!
@zalive, sadly I found your words to be all too true. I still remember all the hassle of trying to source genuine high purity OFC copper speaker cables on eBay.
After trying to trawl through the maze of varying prices and some non too convincing pictures and fine print descriptions I gave up went to Amazon UK and read through the reviews there which eventually led me to some transparent sleeved BasicLine15 metre 2x2 5mm set from Germany (DCSk) claiming to be 99.99% saueurstoffreie.
I have no real way of knowing whether they are the genuine article but they are reassuringly heavy and do have that reddish copper colour.
China (ebay, aliexpress...) merchants audio products are full of false specifications. If you want to check yourself, buy stuff declared as copper (RCA sockets, power plugs...), then check yourself whether it's really copper - piece of metal saw will reveal what's underneath the gold plating (or rhodium, silver, possibly even copper plating). Copper is read and it's pretty soft, too. I checked myself some RCA sockets and power plugs and I found brass underneath, judging by the colour and hardness. And that's true not only for brands (brand fakes) but also for non-branded stuff.
So it's not quality when they don't even make using a copper conductor just because alloy like brass is cheaper to make. We're not even talking about purity of metal or its processing (like declared cryo treatment lol).
I'm not entering into all brand faking aspects, because, frankly, cheating on brand is not my concern. However cheating on common people like me certainly is. whether it's about faking a brand or not.
Moral or ethical or ethical considerations when it comes to Audiophile sales techniques?
Since when?
No one EVER claims that their product is better than anyone elses.
Never.
And why not?
Because that would mean having to prove it, having to back it with facts and data if challenged.
Because that might mean making enemies.
Because the best you can claim is superior construction, better more durable materials, better support - but that doesn’t really cut the ice much with the price obsessed consumer does it? Especially not with fancy overpriced wires.
No, it's far better to imply some quasi mystical quality using terminology evoking the various Nordic legends as you go. How about Thor's hammer next? Don't think that's been copyrighted by Marvel (Disney) just yet or has it?
Irony of ironies, the established snake oil cable salesmen are now begrudging the new kids on their block. It’s getting like the audio equivalent of ghetto turf wars.
Cheerfully peddling everyday tat to the gullible at the highest dollar just like the fashion industry, especially the big dollar sports branch. And then oneday someone puts out an equivalent product, steals your logo, and exposes you for what you really are... You can call it market forces or chickens coming home to roost if you like.
There’s a reason why Led Zeppelin never took anyone to court for plagiarism. Pot calling the kettle black.
Seriously, is there any cable peddler who is willing to claim that there products are sonically more accurate in ANY way?
You misunderstand. I agree that on ethical or moral issues everyone has a right to an opinion and that is what I said. However I question the validity of opinions with regard to fake cable quality or sound without having seen or heard the cables in question.
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