Quality control is a separate -- and less important from a global and moral standpoint -- issue than such things as labor, trade, and environmental practices, and violations of intellectual property rights. As Eldartford suggests, ultimately the market will enforce QC, at least in the area of entertainment electronics, regardless of governmental rules. That's not necessarily true for the more weighty issues.
On my questions above about who exactly is ripping off what, I'm still waiting. By my count, at least 4 guys have charged that here, all without a single specific example, or telling how they 'know' this, other than Tommy saying that Cayin and Prima Luna are guilty of this without saying whom they copied, and Nrchy mentioning the outward appearance of some stuff -- no brands mentioned -- he's seen at trade shows. So maybe the styling is deliberately derivative on some of this stuff -- nothing we haven't seen before in electronics, or cars, or shavers, or pots and pans... I seriously doubt that any audiophiles anywhere are confused about what is Cary gear and what is Chinese (the cable counterfeiters, of course, are another topic). But as for the charges that circuits are being rampantly copied in violation of any suppposed intellectual property rights, apparently the crowd has suddenly gone hazy, so I must assume no one's really got any hard evidence for this.
Which I realize isn't surprising, and doesn't prove that it isn't happening, but neither does simply asserting that it's happening prove that it is. And neither does it refute what Eldartford said about the vast majority of tube circuit design. (Interesting, isn't it -- but not at all surprising, given the audiphilic worldview -- that no one seems to be up in arms about solid-state design in this regard?)
