There is still plenty to be said for experience.

Loads of magazine and YouTube reviewers talk about products with which they have only a short run of experience. Even if they get a product for a couple of months, what do they know about it? Often… just a little. They don’t give you an ownership picture.

Here’s a case in point. A reviewer just wrote about GoldenEar T44 towers for $5k per pair. It’s a great price point and it’s a pleasure to see when price-no-object magazines deign to review something a workingman can afford.

However, early on the reviewer quickly dismissed the potential problems of mass production from China. He implied that these are built just as well as if they were built in the UK or Europe. Ummm, not so fast buddy boy!

Since I’ve been in the biz for over 50 years, I have a few points I’d like to make that Mr Reviewer clearly doesn’t know.

When a product is made in China, you don’t get the TLC that you will likely get from a family owned company from Canada or Europe. Here are two issues where it matters.

Consistency

When you get great speakers from Atohm of France or Bryston/Axiom of Canada, you get TIGHT QC on every driver that goes into the speakers.

Each driver that Bryston/Axiom manufactures won’t be passed on to be USED unless it is built with .5 dB of the reference standard of that driver. Atohm of France is even tighter at .25dB.

Having drivers built to exacting standards guarantees that you’ll get the best possible clarity, power handling and focus. It’s like getting lenses in your glasses that are precisely built for your prescription. The pair of speakers YOU end up with will be RIGHT.

The Chinese make drivers of wide disparity. Their plus/minus range of performance is wide. Yes, they’ll probably work and play for the warranty period. Yet we’ve seen pairs of speakers where tweeters are 3-4 dB eschew (right vs left) when actually measured by British hi-fi News.

THAT is a long distance behind the precision of Atohm or Bryston.

When you further consider the ramifications of having mid and woofer drivers that are similarly off kilter, the ultimate prescription of the “glasses” your ears are working with, is vague rather than precise. This is even before we consider the reliability concern of mass production.

Reliability

When a fellow has speakers for a month or two, he has NO IDEA what may happen a year or two, or 5 or 7 down the road. Having sold GE from its inception, I can tell you it’s a fairly priced brand of cut above performance.

But… there is a good likelihood that the on board amps that drive the woofers will fail in 5-7 years. A magazine reviewer is inclined to believe a manufacturer who tells him the failure rate is 1%.

For those of us who have sold the actual products, we can tell you that the failure rate at 7 years is closer to 33%. What’s more alarming is, when you get a replacement amp for your speaker, it is not a NEW amp. It is invariably a repaired amp from someone else’s failure. You could very well be replacing a 7 year old sub amp with a repaired 7 year old sub amp. At what price?

When GE was owned by Sandy Gross, the company was very friendly in exchanging amps at modest pricing. Then Audio Quest bought GE. AQ ran GE into the ground within 4 years. And now it’s owned by the Paradigm family of brands.

Paradigm famously charges big bucks for replacement drivers- which are much more reliable than repaired amps. One can argue that Paradigm is smart to do this, to stay afloat. You can’t be giving drivers away forever. But … if you’re replacing a sub amp that’s an old repair, how reliable can it be? Not very. How much is it WORTH? Not much.

I’ll finish my diatribe by recommending you buy Atohm or Bryston/Axiom. You get better sounding products of much better reliability.

By the way, the vast majority of what you see on the market at affordable money, is made in China. Even if the brand name is Euro like REL, B&W, Kef, Advance Paris, Musical Fidelity.. their affordable stocks are vendored in China. The uber expensive models at the top of the line may well be made in Europe. For the products most of us working men will purchase, stick with Canada and Europe!