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

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.

Trelja - It's amazing that this company is still in business. I'm surprised by better quality of hand soldered components than SMT. My experience is different. SMT process is much better controlled than hand soldering. Company I work for had a lot of problems with hand soldering a no problems at all with SMT - zero. SMT process is well controlled to pitch of 12 mils while density/pitch of an audio board is usually not smaller than 20 mils. Many companies use SMT boards (Krell, Linn etc) and a lot of CD players have SMT boards. Where this boards come from? - most likely from China. I suspect that as long as gear is put together here it can be called "Made in USA". It would be interesting to find exactly same piece of equipment made at the same time in two countries.

Your point about human versus machine manufacturing is valid, Kijanki. However, as I said in my first post, it presupposes the design of said product is sound in the first place. Clearly, in my situation, it's not.

And, again, the company I represent is one of more well known and successful. One of the Chinese "Big 5" as they're known, in high-end audio circles.

Trelja - I agree, good design and management is the main factor. People can be trained including quality control.

Waryn is afraid of CD player "Made in China", but he should be afraid of Chinese CD players. Rowland uses Icepower boards manufactured now by B&O in China. It's still Rowland isn't it?