"A question to all who currently own these counterfeit cables…
When you’re ready to move on and upgrade, what will you do with these fakes?"
I have a few sets of the Chinese Nordost Odin Gold IC's here. They're good cables (having replaced some $300-$400 IC's) and I now have a few extras (as I upgraded to the Accuphase 40th Anniversary IC's at $20 a pair haha!) and will probably just keep them as it's nice to have some extras around to accommodate changes/additions in the secondary system. Or I might just give them to a younger audiophile who might be building a system that could put them to use, telling them of course that they're fakes.
If I was to sell them on, I'd clearly identify them as Chinese clones and sell them at a reasonable price, certainly less than what they could be purchased for directly on Aliexpress. And the ones I have here have been cryoed and burned in on an Audiodharma cable cooker.
I'd certainly make an effort to sell them to someone that I thought would not misrepresent them in the future, but stuff happens and there are unscrupulous people out there-it is just human nature sadly.
I sold a Koetsu Black (a real one LOL!) about 20-25 years ago on this site that had a few thousand hours on it and needed to be retipped or rebuilt (which was not really an affordable option in those days-would have needed to go back to Koetsu for big $$$, which I was not willing to do), fully disclosing to the Buyer these details. He turned around and passed it on as a much newer cartridge selling it to another member here for big $$$. Info on this may still be archived here-that 3rd buyer complained through Audiogon and I came forward to support him and I believe the buyer I sold to was forced to refund the $$$ and may have been banned.
Unfortunately stuff like this is going to happen, whether it's with counterfeit or non-counterfeit goods. How many 70's Pioneer or Marantz receivers have been picked up at the Goodwill, sprayed with some contact cleaner and then sold for thousands of $$$ with a claim that they've been fully serviced.
As I have stated clearly in threads like these many times, buying the Nordost clones (or the Accuphase branded product) has not taken any money out of the pockets of Nordost. The Chinese "Nordost" are $50 and the real Nordost are $30,000. Yes, I'd prefer that the Chinese not label or brand them as Nordost. But I'd also prefer that Nordost not sell their real Nordost Golds for $30,000. Frankly, I find both to be almost equally distasteful, for lack of a better word.
In the overall scheme of things in my life which I feel are distasteful, though, both rank very low in terms of being excessively bothersome (ie. there are much more important things to get worked up about).
As in: I'm going to get about as worked up about buying the Chinese clone wire as I am thinking about how disgustingly obscene it might be that Nordost is selling interconnects for $30K at what are surely outrageous profit margins and the guy that's buying them could be donating that money to feed a small village in Africa for a year or even impoverished people more local to him. (Now if the guy wants to buy the real Nordost Gold AND support the impoverished, clearly I could have no problem with that!) And I am certainly not a bleeding heart liberal.
There are a lot of different ways to actually look at this situation. It's not really a black and white one to me. Lots of grey here.
Am I my audiophile brother's keeper? Yeah, in the sense of not misrepresenting something and ripping someone off going forward. But no in the sense of being responsible for the scumbag who might buy from me to resell and make a profit.
And, as I say, there's plenty of that going on in the hobby and sites like this on non-counterfeit product as well.
