Japanese integrated amp, Japanese preamp, American turntable, American speakers, American power conditioner. I’m not exactly the patriotic type, and haven’t bought an American car since the late 60’s. But just as "Made in Japan" used to stand for junk, Chinese manufacturing has taken over that catagory. Low prices coincide with an endemic lack of manufacuring quality control. Compare a simple item you can visually inspect like an American or German made tool compared to a Chinese equivalent. The difference is obvious if you look at the castings.
I laughed when I read (I think it was) baseball great Ichiro Suzuki’s farewell interview when he retired and was going back home to Japan. Out of the blue, he observed, "everything breaks in America". No wonder, everything here is Chinese made junk anymore. That’s not to say American cars weren’t made like garbage until Toyota and their ilke cleaned American carmaker’s clock with their excellent later 20th century Japanese quality control standards. But buying Chinese audio equipment and hoping to avoid the quality control quagmire over there is a risk not worth taking until they clean up their manufacturing act.
Until then there’s lots of dependable quality merchandise including audio equipment coming out of Europe, Japan, the U.S. and Canada and these are all free world counties where your consumer dollar isn’t supporting dictators and massive concentration camps like the Chinese treat the Uighar population to on the side.
Peace, love, good music, and do the right thing,
Mike