Chinese fake cables How fake, how good?

Cables.
There is no winner here.  Choose your path.

Originals - You pay a lot for safety, and re-sale value, and guaranteed performance levels. 

Illegal copies - Don't cost as much as "originals", you dont know what you are getting. Might be great, might be crap. The key risk is safety. 

The best bet? - Make your own. But, only of you know what you are doing (for the sake of safety) 

MY background is in Track & Field Athletics 

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

Matt 

I see OCC Solid Core cables on "the auction site" inexpensivly priced. I would not buy there, but why would the material be trusted?

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. 

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.