’Counterfeit’ is when product of inferior quality pretends to be a real thing. As far as I can tell, Chinese knockoff do no pretend and simply advertise as ’same schematics’ for amps or ’same materials and technology’.
Prices of ’real’ thing are not defined by quality or cost of materials. They are defined by how many units company can sell using its brand name. dCS sells DACs for $20K. Chinese can use same parts, they have same quality of engineers and FPGA programmers, China manufactures those 0.0001% tolerance parts so they can definitely replicate products at fraction of their brand name costs.
This is generally normal process in all industries. Eventually everyone can make your better mousetrap and it is no longer exclusive.