@evank The "real" picture has been meticulously prepared by Furutech to showcase their product. I'm thinking if you took the same care and attention they did, you could make the "fake" cable look almost as good? You're also comparing two different product lines? They make a replica cable that looks identical to the real thing. Same outer casing right down to the lettering of the name. You appear to doing a bit of an apple to orange comparison? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's lots of crap product out there and even the best replicas may not be as good as the real thing. Just not sure if the difference between the real and the good fakes can warrant costing 10 - 20 times as much.
Counterfeit Chinese Cables
I thought that I would write this for those who are curious about one of the many counterfeit Chinese interconnect cables that are available these days. I know that there have been threads about the subject before, and I was always curious because they seem to be such a bargain. I don't really recall much about what any members actually said about the performance of these counterfeit cables, and I didn't look back and do any research, but a couple of months ago there was a thread that came around to discussing the quality of Chinese made components, and oldhvymec said something that made sense to me.
He said that people that say that what they are making is junk should consider that much of what is in our gear, and a lot of our American brands are actually manufactured there. I decided shortly after that that I would take the chance on a set of interconnects, because I suspected that the interconnects going from my pre to my amp were the weak link and needed upgrading. The interconnects going from my DAC to my pre were Kimber Select which are very good, but the other set were LAT International (now defunct) which had cost $500.00 when new, but I had reason to believe they were lacking because I have one of their digital cables that turned out to be very poor sounding in comparison to others I own.
I decided on a one meter pair of counterfeit Nordost Odin interconnects for a total of $104.00 from Aliexpress. I received them a couple of weeks later. They appeared to be well made, and the locking fake WBT rca's were very impressive and are very tight.
First impressions after installing them were light, thin sound, lacking bass. Each couple of days brought improvements, but from the beginning I noticed that they were quieter. Now, weeks later, I can say that they are drastically better that the LAT's in every way. Detail and ambience are much better, but it's the focus and separation of instruments that is most noticeable.
I have no way of knowing if they are really a copy of the Nordost design, but I am impressed enough that I am going to try a counterfeit Nordost digital cable.
Obviously, this isn't a comparison that is useful to most, because there probably isn't anyone here using the LAT's, and everything is system dependent. I just wanted to relay my positive experience.
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If it looks the same, and has the same component materials and layout, and sounds the same… ? |
Been following this thread for awhile… just ordered two pairs of what I’ve decided to call “Nordin Odost” XLR off AliExpress, not looking to be bowled over by performance, but simply because I have a pressing need for a couple pairs of balanced interconnects and they were priced similarly to the other more basic cables I was looking at on Amazon. |
@spenav looking at the Odin range of products, there are more similarities than differences in build geometry and general ideas between the counterfeit and the genuine - if you exclude the speaker cables whose counterfeit are spirals and not flat ribbons like the genuine. The fake Odin interconnects for example could be using basic multi strand wire in a sleeve that looks like the real thing from the outside, but no, you DO find the silver plated solid core wires in a spiral arrangement and even the tiny thread that separates each core from its teflon sleeve is there. And so is the screening sleeve. So of course the genuine will have much more attention to detail and better materials and everything but looking at the counterfeit I'm absolutely not surprised it sounds so good. The basics are there. |
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