advertisement


Wow, this looks familiar...

geetee1972 said:
They can get away with it because I suspect they aren't doing anything wrong, even outside of China. Please tell me if I am wrong but a product that 'looks' like another product (and this one looks a lot like the B&W speaker for sure but then, all speakers that are drive units in a rectangular box look alike!) but is wholly and entirely different in every other aspect, and is also not being sold as a fake, isn't breaking copyright or infringing patents unless of course you've copyrighted the actual shape ...
Click to expand...
I think it may infringe the "trade dress" intellectual property right, available in some legal systems: "Trade dress is the characteristics of the visual appearance of a product or its packaging (or even the design of a building) that signify the source of the product to consumers".
 
John Phillips said:
I think it may infringe the "trade dress" intellectual property right, available in some legal systems: "Trade dress is the characteristics of the visual appearance of a product or its packaging (or even the design of a building) that signify the source of the product to consumers".
Click to expand...
Ah I had not heard of this concept before so thank you.
 
Mr Pig said:
Because they do not give a feck! From the bottom to the top, the country is totally corrupt. There are books, videos and articles on the scale of the problem and I'd recommend having a look at them. Counterfeiting a few guitars, speakers or cars is nothing! They will fake entire corporations.

My sister used to be a director at chip manufacturer Intel and she said that hey couldn't even think about building a fab (fabrication plant) in China because it's an accepted fact that they'd rip off the chips.
Click to expand...
Having a fab in China is irrelevant. They will reverse engineer your design anyway.
 
The harsh reality is that if you value your design, manufacturing quality, maintaining a UK workforce, good product support and generally looking after the future of the UK then you need to do all of this here and the consumer has to learn to pay the price. We are the makers of our own downfall and no one seems to care enough to change it.
 
My own experience of Ali Express is that some of their sellers will take your money and then send you any random thing they feel like, or nothing at-all, and Ali Express will simply call you a liar and side with the seller.

I got burned on a couple of cheap, generic watches, I hate to think how badly you might get bent-over buying obviously fake goods and thus making yourself complicit in fraud as well - they know they've got you the moment you order.

And even if something does arrive, it's going to be white-van-speaker drive units in garbage-tier enclosures, nasty-ass cheap crossovers, &c. Fools and their money and all that...
 
Another interesting element to consider is when you see all the cheap Chinese imports on Amazon, and there are many exact copies of the same item, even with the same photo, but they're all listed under different brand names that you've never heard of. Whether a conscious ploy or some strange artifact of grander processes, this results in a sort of dissolution of the brand concept. Unless you search for a specific brand, you browse a million named-but-nameless variants and just choose the cheapest. Someone somewhere gets the profit and you get the cheap gizmo, without any mental connections made between brand name and quality of lack thereof. You find yourself with less knowledge of the market, less idea of what names to search for with some confidence in quality etc. Note that with regards to audio I'm not taking about higher end names that struck around like Topping, but all the quasi-anonymous tat at the low end.

Anyway, with that process in place, suddenly knock-offs of major brands start to have a more defined place. They're what you get when you don't know brands but you have subconsciously absorbed the design language of those brands. Searching for speakers then, you identify a classy looking pair and it's relatively cheap, so you go for it, none the wiser.

A bit fanciful I admit but probably some truth to it....
 
Last edited:
Paul McDonough said:
The harsh reality is that if you value your design, manufacturing quality, maintaining a UK workforce, good product support and generally looking after the future of the UK then you need to do all of this here and the consumer has to learn to pay the price. We are the makers of our own downfall and no one seems to care enough to change it.
Click to expand...
As someone who worked in electronic manufacturing from leaving school, I’ve been saying this for over 20 years… rich CEO flaunting it with a new Aston Martin on the car park whilst pleading poverty don’t give a f**k about their workforce, they start by denying pay rises, then they cut back overtime but increase the order books… then come the redundancies, despite a full order book… then your job goes to China and you’re on your arse… CEO buys himself another holiday home out of what should be our salary… that’s been the state of manufacturing in the UK for a few years, it needs to change.
 
gustav_errata said:
...
A bit fanciful I admit but probably some truth to it....
Click to expand...


Your observation is not only correct, but is consciously and deliberately driven by Amazon's (and others) algorithms, which pretty much never show you what you're searching for, but rather repeatedly re-list similar paid-for content, for page after page. Google and other search engines do the same. They all seem to almost completely override Boolean search terms now. You're not seeing what you want to see, you're seeing what they want you to see. Sounds paranoic tinfoil-hattery, but for them it's great business - stack another $trillion in the vaults &c...
 
earlofsodbury said:
Your observation is not only correct, but is consciously and deliberately driven by Amazon's (and others) algorithms, which pretty much never show you what you're searching for, but rather repeatedly re-list similar paid-for content, for page after page. Google and other search engines do the same. They all seem to almost completely override Boolean search terms now. You're not seeing what you want to see, you're seeing what they want you to see. Sounds paranoic tinfoil-hattery, but for them it's great business - stack another $trillion in the vaults &c...
Click to expand...

Endgame being that the only recognizable brand name for some items on Amazon is Amazon....
 
Paul McDonough said:
The harsh reality is that if you value your design, manufacturing quality, maintaining a UK workforce, good product support and generally looking after the future of the UK then you need to do all of this here and the consumer has to learn to pay the price. We are the makers of our own downfall and no one seems to care enough to change it.
Click to expand...

The difficulty is that it is now almost impossible to make anything more complex than a wooden stool without using Chinese-made materials and components.

I make a carbon fibre tone-arm. Could I find a UK manufacturer of carbon-fibre stock? No. Every firm which put up the appearance of being a UK source was actually getting it from you-know-where.

Then there's cost. The difference in cost of produced parts is the difference between running a viable business or not bothering because nobody can afford your product. We are now the 2nd World.
 
Enough people prioritise cost above all else that finding ourselves here was always going to happen. Funny thing about outsourcing is that is soon as it’s good quality, you have to pay the same and now you don’t have the skills available yourself anymore and so the next stage is to be a bit poorer and less able. Ho hum, we do it to ourselves.
 
may I ask to elaborate with facts as to how exactly you decided that all those B&W, ATC, etc. clones sold on Alibaba are Chinese makes, please? to give some clue, belief alone won't count :D
 
sq225917 said:
The chinglesh and the vendor name
Click to expand...
anyone can be a vendor there, only has to register as such, with any name - and even here people make spelling mistakes> no win :(
also, we're talking about the maker of the product, not the vendor
anyone else?
 
coltrane said:
may I ask to elaborate with facts as to how exactly you decided that all those B&W, ATC, etc. clones sold on Alibaba are Chinese makes, please? to give some clue, belief alone won't count :D
Click to expand...
proof.png
 
thanks, it's a proof - I have no more questions. the reason to know was that people nowadays can so easily make judgements...
 
I was talking to an EE mate a few days ago and he recommended to me a Chinese PCB fab house of seemingly amazing capabilities and unbelievable price. Further questioning and online checks of my own backed it up as being "for real".
We are talking apparently top quality PCB's where they supply a finished PCB of the right size for a SS phono stage for around 50p each!!:eek: This is fully inclusive of set up fee's for the processing machinery etc (labour to program the machinery etc etc)!!:eek: The postage is more than the cost of 10 finished PCB's and he assures me he's used them several times and everything is as good as claimed... Yep they make you 10 finished PCB's for £5! This includes them doing the Gerbers and drill rack files for you! You would usually have to do this yourself and provide the files for these to your PCB maker.

How does that compare to the UK? It would cost me something like £3.50 each just to buy BLANK copper clad PCB boards of that size which have not yet been processed for a start! And more like double that for one's pre treated with photo resist, a necessary part of the process. This is if getting them from somewhere like RS to make the PCB's at home.... a thankless task which one wouldn't really attempt these days but useful for illustrative purposes.

A UK PCB house would charge something like £5 - £8 per board plus a set up fee of about £120 (ISH!! could be half or double that but you get the idea) and a bit more for double sided boards. The Chinese ones are double sided...

Would I use these Chinese PCB companies? Would I f**k!!
 
Chinese company PCBWay sponsor a large percentage of the YouTube retro computer channels and appear to provide very high quality products and service. They and similar companies have effectively made countless grass-roots projects possible as they just wouldn’t be financially viable otherwise. Same within the Raspberry Pi community; so many maker and Open Source projects come to life this way.

I have no issue with this as these are freely distributed shared projects so no intellectual property being compromised and it helps keep countless classic computers and consoles up, running and fun for their users and collectors.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top