Chinese audio…?

In 2006 I was in a reasonably lucky financial situation and so bought via Ornec an Original 2008F HDCD CD player and a Yarland Pro 200SE 300B SE amplifier. Both of these units looked amazing and were very stylish by comparison with British units but of course I could not listen to either before purchase. The sum total of these two units after import duty was around seven hundred and fifty pounds.

In 2007 the Original stopped working but still had internal power as some of the solenoids were still clicking on power up/power down. I took the unit into a local electrical store and had their engineer take a look at it to see if he could fix it. It turned out that the mains toroidal transformer had burnt out and would need replacing. This was done at a cost of around eighty five pounds. The unit has worked perfectly ever since but in February 2010 was joined by a Beresford Caiman.

The Yarland lasted until 2008 when it developed blue flashes in the 300B’s on power up with loud cracking sounds coming from the speakers. This I now know is referred to as flash over and can often happen in the rectifier valve. I had a valve engineer take a look at the amp and he was to be polite, gobsmacked by what he saw inside the amp. He was disgusted by the internal construction of this amplifier and found out that along with the CD player, the amplifier had a European voltage mains transformer. This meant that all of the amplifiers internal voltages were out with some of the voltages being dangerously high. What I don’t understand is why it took a year and a half to manifest itself in the switch on of the amplifier. The Yarland was eventually sold as a chassis project for sixty quid.

This is simply an outline of my experience with Chinese Hi-Fi not all of which has gone according to plan. What are your personal views on this stuff and how has it affected you…? Would you actually buy any of this now that China has woken up and knows how to price their products…? Would you buy through a British importer who adds a couple of grand just because he has checked it over and modded it…? My personal view is that this Chinese stuff looks amazing but that is about as far as it goes. Yes I could have used a device to match the correct voltage going in but who the hell wants one of those in their lounge under the sofa…? My experience was not so good but I still love valve amps however the Yarland wasn’t a patch on the Croft I now have even though this has it’s fair share of problems.