I'm curious how long the current state of affairs w.r.t. Chinese fake products sold to Americans will last.
So far I'm not aware of any changes to the fundamental drivers that enable / motivate this.
So far I'm not aware of any changes to the fundamental drivers that enable / motivate this.
I would expect a fake to be something like:
- it mimics a particular product but doesn't perform as well (e.g. SD cards that claim to be Kingston 128GB but are actually discard-quality 16GB)
- or it looks much like a real brand and product but isn't on close inspection (e.g. COBY vs SONY for quite a while)
- or it claims to be a particular thing and isn't (e.g. a tube amplifier that never needs replacement tubes because the tubes aren't connected at all to the LM379 IC actually delivering 6 watts.
All of those things are fakes.
This is a solid state amplifier with a tube preamp stage, which is... well, if you know what you're buying, I guess you could buy that, but I personally wouldn't. I suppose it looks like a tube power amp, superficially, but the nature of a tube pre-amp and a tube power-amp is to look pretty similar anyway.
The bigger general problems, I think, are in Amazon's total lack of care in co-mingling shipments sold on behalf of third-parties, and the general OEM problem where the same equipment has eight different faceplates or cases put on the same board and sold for a range of prices up to two magnitudes different.
No it isn't, if you check the schematics in the article you'll see that the tubes aren't biased properly and are mostly disconnected. They can't amplify audio. It's not even a starved plate design (which wouldn't need the 6.3V filament voltage).
The circuit is clever enough to stop amplifying as soon as one of the tubes is disconnected, so they're a glorified switch. Which IMO is worse than if the tubes were there only for asthetic purposes.
I'm specifically thinking of:
- Non-compliant USB / HDMI cables sold through Amazon and NewEgg.
- Some products from China being containing quantities of heavy metals or other toxins that violate U.S. law.
- Wall-wart power adapters whose product descriptions lie about the output voltage. Enough to cause problems for some but not all devices.
In retrospect, it seems unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers/sellers are just one part of the problem. They couldn't get away with it if Amazon, the FTC, Congress, etc. were more effective.