You know what they say..'if it's too good to be true'!
How Is This Possible? Must be Counterfeits
I just stumbled upon this website and they have branded products such as Nordost and Audioquest at about 10% of the normal retail. How is this even possible and if they are indeed fakes, how come companies like Nordost do not sue them? Truly puzzling. https://www.aliexpress.us/w/wholesale-nordost.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.search.0
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@ronkent Before we start yet another thread on this topic, check out this thread that is up to 19 pages of comments and still going. Everything that can be said, has been said. Cheers.
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What is the cost of a Nordost Odin cable ? 😊 Many, many thousand bucks ... There is nothing puzzling... They are fake sold at 100 bucks... Only helpless people can believe this is a deal ... The problem is some helpless people buying them can decide to resell them as true Nordost Odin ... Then helpless people became a bandit ... And bigtwin is right ...There is another thread check it ... Cables thread are most of the times useless...
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@ronkent And therein lies the $64,000 Dollar Question. It's become a big crap-shoot when buying any used cables these days. The short answer would be just don't. Otherwise Let common sense prevail. Insist on the original invoice for the manufacturer. Lots of detailed photos. Does the seller have a 5 star rating from numerous buyers? In the end, you pay your money and you take your chances. IMHO Cheers. |
You must have been vacationing on the moon for the last two years. As @bigtwin said, every aspect of the subject has been discussed on the thread he mentioned. Coincidentally, the thread was just closed yesterday due to the posts of a well know troublemaker on this site, but it has not been removed, so there's plenty to read. |
@roxy54 Counterfeit Chinese Cables. Gone..... but not forgotten. I'm thinking we should start another thread by the same name, but this time the subject will be "are the people making the cables actually Chinese, or Counterfeit Chinese" Should be good for 20 pages! 🤣 |
Exactly right ... This is why we must buy nothing which is not a chinese product under a chinese brand name especially in audio ... I bought at a ridiculously low price a headphone amp +tube preamplifier Fosi and Douk... Incredible ratio S.Q. price ... I used it for movie from my computer with my speakers or Akg K240 headphone ... I will never bought a western product sold there with a western name... 😊
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@czarivey I agree and I would love to be able to own the real deal for $50 instead of $40,000 which I’m never gonna spend on a cable. But it isn’t the world we live in. |
Well, it is very possible that the Nordost hineymonkey buys it from China for 65 bucks and sells it to some audiogon savants for 65000. As soon as you see Nordost’s 65k price tag, bow down, provide your standing ovations, pay the 65k and..... visualize the soundstage opening and exploding like the big bang. |
@bigtwin -- Dang! Who blew it for the rest of us! I was rooting for that thread to make it to TWENTY PAGES...came up a few posts short. Rats. But for 2 years and 3 months it was glorious. |
Yeah, save your money, I have tried it and it's not worth it. One of those things to do just to say you did it perhaps. Like flying to space for 50 million? I wouldn't buy it again for the same price as the regular coffee I get shipped to my house at $20 a bag. |
I had a similar thread a while back; the whole thing boggles my mind too. A better question is why Chinese websites like this are allowed to be seen in our Continent, and the rest of the world, while China bans multiple websites, social media platforms, and anything else they don't like- such as journalism that tells the truth. I suppose we value freedom of speech, and we don't want to stoop as low as them. |
@jmalen123 Totally agree re build your own. I think my next power cables will be DIY with parts from VH Audio. https://www.vhaudio.com/neotech-nep-3200.html I built my speaker cables with their CHeLA wire. I'd put them up against cables costing 10 times as much. |
No acoustician ever bought 30,000 bucks cable for his system guess why ? 😊 you are probably not far from truth :
Some chinese are crook and ignorant... Some others are not... How many engineers are created each years in China ?
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comedy |
This Taleb know something others dont know : I read his books by the way and his master was Benoit Mandelbrot the genius creating fractals geometry who i read in 1976 in french when he was unknown ...😊 I trust Taleb judgement listen the video he commented about a Chinese diplomat speaking of Great Britain ... https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1776964373761720543 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1776801470874071551 Some Chinese cable are certainly good but i dont know which one , as some american cable are good but i dont know which one ... Bashing all chinese products is childish reaction ... |
Just buy a Prius. You won’t feel the difference and for the money you saved buy yourself a Louis Vuitton suitcase. |
Some even asked the question ...😊 Some even buy a 20,000 bucks cable...😋 Some even will hear no differences between the 20,000 bucks cables and the fake...😁 Some smile because even if effectively cables matter they dont matter as much for 20,000 bucks in most limited budget ... Those who will contradict this will argue that there is a "difference"... They are not even wrong...I myself hear a difference between all my cables...Yes i am not deaf... I tuned my 100 resonators and it was not bad... 😏 My point is any system must be balanced by all parameters implied in a room ...Cables matter way less than the acoustic location and price of my chair ...😎 Give me a 20,000 bucks chair ... I will use a chinese non counterfeit cables and all will be OK in my marvellous acoustically well located chair ... If all details matter as claimed by cables sellers , the chair position matter way more among many other as much important acoustic parameter... Why there is no chair position and comfort threads between two cables thread ? Because no one sell acoustic chair ... 😉 |
I have worked in mainland China and across the globe for decades in the manufacturing supply chains. China is full of great people, hundreds that I have known. The vast majority are great people with similar hopes and dreams… with about 700 million trying to get from lower class near poverty to the middle class.
The government of China does not recognize international patent laws and some people take advantage of this. Yes, this is bad, they should and as they develop their own proprietary technology they will eventually want to protect it and get on board. The US is full of people that do much worse than this. It is unfair to generalize from the actions of a few to all. I read about the fakes and since I had a pair of Nordost Odin 2 interconnects for a while I bought a pair of fakes from AliExpress. No, they do not sound like the real thing or are they constructed of the same materials. I’ll throw them out at some point versus let some one try to pass them off as real. |
How did you determine this? Did you actually cut into your expensive original Nordost and the fake one, lay them out side by side to see what the layup is, etc? 😑 How different did they sound sonically? any specifics you can elaborate on? |
I looked at them, they are not nearly the same external quality. Also, a number of people have cut them open… scraping the silver coating off the copper wire. They sound nothing like the refined Odin 2… vailed, less dynamic, less detailed not close to the same league. There is actually more than one imitator making these things. A number of different brands. |
It is not far less preposterous to think that buying a 50,000 bucks gear upgrade for a living room will be 30,000 times better than a 20,000 system in a dedicated acoustic room ... And this proposal is the general intuition among many audiophiles.. Acoustics rules audio not price tags ...
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Perhaps a lot more than in most parts of the world for obvious reasons and yes most of engineers including Chinese strongly believe that the only difference between any wire including fakes and Nordost is just a brand name for which you can pay upto $30k more. |
For sure... And most Chinese as most American engineers will laugh at me using shungite and quartz... It only prove that engineers had limits... Being nothing i had no limits...😊 My cables are "different" but i dont sell them ... 😉
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Stupidity is what it is. There are miniscule to non-existent gains in cables above a certain price point. There are much bigger gains by spending in other areas. I have some of the more expensive cables from the likes of Ansuz, Audioquest, etc, mostly given to me by a couple of friends at some point. I can at least appreciate the technical ideas there with some brands, i.e., some of the more innovative ways of noise rejection by the likes of Ansuz, etc. Nordost is just a silly non-cranial brand, ugh ( a whole lotta nothing there, but fluff)...Makes sense to me that the Chinese are selling it for 60 bucks.
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I am flabbergasted by the way the brain work... Others had all the faults , ourselves none ... I bet many had never read a book ... 😊 For sure it is true the CCP dont recognise any patent laws...😁 But what else is also true ?
To stay in the cables thread i must say that i just damped my chinese preamplifier tubes with silicone rings...(1 dollars for 10)😎 Way better imaging and details ...Like buying a way costlier cable upgrade... You know what i means ? 😁 I never encountered this improvement change with an European tube amplifier which i bought for a way higher cost than my chinese preamplifier ( 6 times higher cost)... Anyway it was so bad headphone amplifier , a well reviewed one by the way , i sold it with 40 tubes few years ago for a low price 😁... I vouch to never bought tubes again ... 😊 I was wrong ... Then i will not bash low cost Chinese product. Some are more than just good for the price ...Some are trash... It is the same thing in any country by the way some gear are bad and some are good ...
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No one bashed any Chinese products. The discussion was how they effectively copy products and sell them blatantly as the same brand. If they were selling as a duplicate brand name, example Sharp Vs Shrap, then that would be different. Don’t jump into conclusions just because have so much time on hand. |