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Budget Chinese Tube amps - any good?

In the midst of searching for a budget tube amp. Lots of chinese made models keep popping up. The price on these amps are often really low and would give someone like me a chance to try the tube sound for cheap.

Do you guys have any good experiences with them?

Reason I'm asking is that I hear many conflicting experiences online on each amp. Some say their amps are really good, some say they are really bad - each model might have 5 good reviews and 5 bad reviews. I guess this is par for course with audio, where subjectivity is the rule of the game. However, chinese amps tend to have the largest disparity of opinions.

The models I've read up on so far are: Mingda amps, Miniwatt N3, Yaqin amps etc.
milesandcoltrane
wolf_garcia
6,608 posts
 
Beware of anybody claiming to have "golden" ears...they're more likely to be guilded tin.
gopher
499 posts
 
I always find the responses to these threads to be completely ridiculous. Yes, there is crap coming out of China, but there are a lot of SOLID companies with very good sounding equipment. Melody for example is designed in Austria and built in China--I just sold their $2k introductory amp (which kicked the crap out of a Music Reference RM-9, VAC PA100/100 and Decware Torii 3 IMO) to buy their $6k flagship integrated.

There are plenty of other GREAT Chinese options as well, Prima Luna, Cayin, Jasmine, Eastern Electric--these companies do NOT suck!
johnsonwu
467 posts
 
I was about to post my rant and realized that Gopher's post exactly mirrors my opinion.
And guess what? Those who went to the CA Audio Show this past weekend...the room with TRI triode electronics driving Acoustic Zen speakers hosted by Robert Lee. The TRI amps are made in China, and in my opinion that setup is one of the best if not the absolute best of the show.
Cayin and Melody are not "Ming Da cheap and thus filled with counterfeit components like *Rudycon* caps", but they are a lot better in terms of build quality and circuit considerations for safety and reliability.
jburidan
803 posts
 
Agree with Kentaja's comments about track record. Plus, the Chinese stuff is made with slave labor, and the mark-up must be enormous.
wolf_garcia
6,608 posts
 
If a well made Chinese based amp isn't expensive, you can assume the markup isn't enormous. Besides...our great country was built on slave labor so there's a tradition there (joking, but still a truth albeit a sad one). Apparently, unlike MAC and others, Michael Allen (Jolida) started a new factory a while back with much higher wages and far better working conditions than nearly any other Chinese factory, all to insure production of a higher quality product at a reasonable price.
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