December 11 - It’s no secret that an increasing amount of hi-fi consumed around the world is made in China. But what are these factories like? Who are their founders? How do they approach high-end design and manufacturing?

To answer these questions, I embarked on a four-city tour (GuangZhou, Zhu Hai, Shanghai, and Beijing) for a firsthand look inside the Chinese audio industry. I visited four companies—a metal fabrication plant, and three equipment-design-and-manufacturing facilities.

Metal Fabrication
The first stop was ETKG in GuangZhou, the country’s leading supplier of metal parts to the Chinese audio industry. The company started ten years ago with a single CNC machine for fabricating metal parts and has since grown to 170 CNC machines. The factory takes in raw aluminum stock and produces faceplates, chassis, heatsinks, knobs, and other metalwork found in audio gear. 

Next: Metal Fabrication (cont)

December 10 - “You have to see it with your own eyes to believe it.” So I was told by more than one person during the GuangZhou audio show about the hi-fi system—no, make that systems—of a Mr. Ji Hui Li.

Everyone who mentioned Mr. Li invariably referred to him as “the world’s Number One audiophile.”

The show was winding down and we were leaving the next afternoon for Zhu Hai to visit the Original CD-player factory. The town in which Mr. Li lived was a few hours out of the way—would we like to visit? How could I pass up the opportunity to visit “the world’s Number One audiophile?”

We arrived at a completely nondescript building in middle of the city of Yang Jiang. The outside of the building gave no hint of what lay inside. Mr. Li, an extremely jovial and friendly man, greeted us himself with great enthusiasm. He led us to the elevator of his seven-story “house” and the tour started on the second floor. The elevator doors opened and the first thing I saw were two massive AC power stabilizers—all to power his hi-fi gear.

Continue the tour of the World’s Number One Audiophile’s Home here

December 3 - China’s booming economy and rise as an exporting giant are having an increasingly important effect on the audio industry. The influence is two-fold. First, Chinese audio factories are turning out high-quality products in every category at prices that U.S. and European manufacturers can’t match.

Second, China’s growing middle and upper classes now have the means to buy quality hi-fi, not just from domestic manufacturers, but from those same U.S. and European companies with which the local factories compete. The bottom line is that China is producing—and consuming—an increasingly large share of the world’s hi-fi.

These trends were on vivid display at the GuangZhou AV Fair. I’m on a ten-day trip through China, starting with three days at the GuangZhou show followed by visits to hi-fi factories in GuangZhou, Shanghai, and Beijing.

In this first installment of my trip blog, I’ll give you a tour of the show’s highlights. After attending the opening ceremonies I got my first look at the hi-fi scene in China.

The country holds a number of hi-fi exhibitions, but the GuangZhou show is the largest, most prominent, and most prestigious. Consequently, virtually every manufacturer in China and every distributor of foreign-made gear converge on the magnificent Whit Swan hotel, home of the show since the event’s inception 14 years ago.

This year’s show hosted 150 exhibitors in 160 rooms, and was expected to attract more than 25,000 attendees, each of whom paid 50 RMB (about $7.75) to see and hear the latest gear.

Next: Raw Materials and Labor in China

I recently received an e-mail asking me to weigh in on the controversy over whether lossless data-compression systems such as FLAC, Meridian’s MLP (the basis for Dolby TrueHD), and Windows Media Audio (WMA) Lossless degrade fidelity.

It’s an easy matter to prove that the datastream coming out of these systems contains the same bits as what went in. That is, all lossless schemes deliver perfect bit-for-bit accuracy to the source data. But we all know that identical data can sound different - jitter (timing errors) in the clock that controls the digital-to-analog conversion process can introduce analog-like variations in sound quality.

But how do these lossless systems sound in critical listening tests through a reference-quality playback system?

I recently had the opportunity to evaluate FLAC and WMA Lossless in my special report on music servers that will appear in The Absolute Sound Issue 177 (December). As part of that 24-page report, I review the Sooloos (above, left) and Qsonix (above, right) servers. Sooloos uses FLAC, and Qsonix employs WMA Lossless.

Auditioning these servers also gave me the opportunity to explore the question of whether music files streamed from a hard-disk drive sound better than the same music read from the CD that was originally used to rip the file. It’s counter-intuitive to think that a copy could be better than the original, but many listeners contend that a CD-R copy of a CD sounds better than the CD from which it was made.

My conclusion was that not only are FLAC and WMA Lossless sonically transparent, but the music files read from the servers sounded better than the CDs from which those files were made. 

On the next page are the first few paragraphs of an article that accompanies the music server feature addressing this question. The rest of the article details the reasons why.

You can read the entire music-server coverage in The Absolute Sound Issue 177, which hits newsstands on October 30.

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Next page … Excerpt from Robert Harley’s article, “Do Hard-Disk Drives Sound Better than CD?”