CD player NOT made in China under $1,000?

Spoolyt -
"You want junk, they will give you junk"

- completely agree. There is a factory in Korea called "Samic" that manufactures guitars (largest in the world). Assembly lines are totaly automated and everything is computerized. They built about 0.5 million instruments a year. Most guitars come from them. When they build expensive guitars for Gretch they dial different woods and hardware than when the order is for cheap guitars.

Not only that PC boards inside of "Made in USA" electronics are assembled in China but also semiconductors come most likely from the fab in China, Inodnesia, Singapur, Korea etc.

Once, when I felt very patriotic, I bought Ford. Thing did not work as I expected (it was a disaster). Now I have Toyota Avalon that just had first brake job after 12 years and 100k miles. No single problem or repair, just oil changes (looks and drives like new). It was built in Kentucky. Both cars were made in USA but Japanese design and used materials were better.

I bought recently Metabo Drill. It was the only company still manufacturing at home in Germany and very proud of it. It says on the handle "Made in PRC" (Peoples Republic of China).

Kira, The Chinese gear Ive purchased has had far more problems for me than any other country of origin. Nice the price is low but so is the quality and how they handle customers. With Chinese drivers some I reject over 50%. Seen a major manufacturer send reps to US distributor to check out quality of Chinese production once seen this rep remove 40% of Chinese produced drivers. And these are not low cost parts... And the uneducated US worker comment. My teamster friends would like to talk with you on that one.

Trelja - where do you see 75% failure rates? Cambridge Audio manufactures in China and there failure rate is not so high. Cambridge design engineer once told me that manufacturing their gear in UK would raise price 2x.

CNC is a good thing. People hand made stuff for ages because there was no other way. CNC is more accurate and repeatable - not to mention production cost. There is still a lot of gear hand soldered but we move toward SMT and SMT automatic assembly machines in China are the same as in US.

Kijanki, "Trelja - where do you see 75% failure rates?"

I see it in the line that I represent, which is one of the foremost and well respected of Chinese audio producers.

I'm not pulling numbers out of thin air, I've documented this, and obviously shared them with the company. Along the way, I've also built up relationships with counterparts ala other distributors for the line, and their figures work out the same. In fact, there is one product that has a documented 100% failure rate. 100%!!! The company's reaction? Well, if they took their quality issues seriously, and reacted in the expected manner, you would see me writing from a different perspective in this thread.

I understand your point regarding CNC. But again, what I am saying is that it provides a false sense of build quality in that we are led to believe that what inside the box is up to the same standards as the box itself. In reality, they have absolutely no relationship to each other whatsoever.

You can infer from my previous post that it is, in fact, the hand soldered components (tube amplifiers and preamplifiers) that are far more reliable than those relying on PCB and/or SMT (CD players and solid state/hybrid amplification). In fact, statistically, the tube components are at least 3 orders of magnitude more reliable. Therefore, I actually have no hesitation in recommending this gear.

One final point, the price advantage of Chinese components has disappeared. For example, a certain tube integrated from a well known and established American manufacturer costs $1795. My aim was to have the company I represented produce for me a similar offering. When all was said and done, what would that product have to retail for? $2495.