First of all, I have a lot of respect for American brands and design, I am also sure that given the right conditions (tooling, etc.) the same product manufactured in the US and China will be the same, lets say you have a chinese worker in an american factory, same product, we will then have only personal diferences, one worker will twist wires one way the other a little diferent, same product quality.
Today Japanese design is wolrd class, Koetsu cartridges, Kondo amps, Goto horn drivers, are these better than american products?... probably this designs are even based on american products (say Western Electric) but redesigned and taken to extremes sometimes.
I have found in Audio (and probably in life) there is not good or bad system, yes there is better and extremly good but most of the times all is system dependent and listener tastes dependent, and like a friend tells me also, the best sounding speaker in the world is the one you made yourself (maybe some ego in there also).
Maybe in ten or fifteen years we will be collecting early century (say 2002) Shanling cd players because we noticed the tone is whatever better than xx and so high prices on Ebay for Shanling gear and DCS converters will be seen as flawed technology...who knows, but I am sure that in 10 years the good chinese High End brands will be at the same level as the Japanese or American or English high end brands.
All the Best
