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smallmachine
8
Apr 12, 2016
This brand is on here a lot. I have never used their products, but I have seen the mfg's website. The broken English, unreadable tables full of glyphs, semi-functioning navigation, and large swaths of incomplete template website gibberish do not inspire confidence. The fact that they do not have an address in the US or a phone number of any kind listed on the website would give me pause before spending this kind of money. Is this brand basing its prices on the cost of doing business with customer support, or have they simply caught the scent of a market where people will pay a lot of money for a piece of anodized aluminum if it is accompanied by some numbers?
Given the bait and switch practices of many Asian manufacturers, I would only trust specs that have been independently verified. That may come off as xenophobic, but I am speaking from personal experience dealing with vendors as an industrial designer. I blatantly distrust the value proposition of SMSL's msrp.
yiri
237
Apr 12, 2016
smallmachine"That may come off as xenophobic"
Sure does!
"speaking from personal experience dealing with vendors as an industrial designer"
You know, my sister is a successful industrial designer. Her company does quite well for itself. We're not the closest of siblings, but I'm sure she and her colleagues would appreciate it if you would refrain from shaming their profession by blaming it for your racism. Also, I'm quite sure that nowhere in her training did the curriculum require the industrial design students to form some sort of magical ability to determine how good a company is at manufacturing electronics, based on their English-language website. Please advise? I suspect a linguist would be better able to work it out. Maybe you are a linguist as well?
Actually, that brings up an interesting point. Since you're aggressively judgemental of the English language skills of people who live and work in SE Asia, just for completeness sake, could you tell me please how many Asian languages you speak? Obviously you'll be fluent in Mandarin and you won't sound like "gibberish" in Japanese, but how's your Cantonese pronunciation, for example? Personally, I find the nine intonations really damn hard, so I try and refrain from being a judgmental little racist shit, but evidently you've got them down pat, huh.
If they were trying to "bait and switch" with some sort of con job, do you think that maybe they might hire people who were highly fluent English communicators? I do. I think that would be very sensible. Further, I think that not having done so would, inevitably, cripple any attempt by them to be "sneaky" - that's the racist cliche, isn't it? And once it's established that the product works, and works well, you start to complain about how them little yellow buggers are stealing your jobs? But since they obviously don't speak fluent English, they can't possibly be tricking you, indicating that the widespread positive reviews of SMSL gear are less the result of evil slanty-eyed trickery and more the result of quality consumer electronics manufacturing processes.
By your logic, English skills, website development skills and consumer electronics manufacture capabilities are linked, joined at the hip. Right? Nobody without an address in the US looks after their customers? Well, then Apple's assembly contractor must have the sort of website that gets a web developer hot under the collar. And on that website, every sentence must be akin to Shakespeare, right? They must own entire blocks of Manhattan, à la Trump? That's a quality electronics company?
http://www.foxconn.com/index.html Meet 富士, manufacturers of essentially everything you use.
Does that upset you? The "glyphs"? Are you feeling tense? Okay, well, they're also known as Hon Hai. No? Fushikang? No? Foxconn? That sounds English enough, doesn't it?
"Oh, well that's why my Playstation 4 broke!" Okay. What's something electronic that you own that doesn't suck? Chances are very high that 富士 - oh, I'm sorry, FOXCONN - made it.
Also, https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/progress-report/ top of this page shows a Foxconn employee at work. As you can see, her lack of English language skills have resulted in a shameful lapse of standards, as she hasn't showered in recent memory and is clad in some sort of tunic made from banana leaves. As you can see, she's just lashed eight Macbooks together to make a raft; to give some back story, she intends to set out on the Yangtze in order to catch fish for lunch. Later she'll shake the silt-laden water and fish guts from the Macbooks and send them off to America for some unsuspecting customer who's fallen for some anodized aluminum accompanied by some numbers.
Oh wait, that's utter bullshit.
I'll paraphrase you: You're the sort of idiot who will "pay a lot of money for a piece of anodized aluminum if it is" ...red white & blue, accompanied by the letters U S and A. The sort who will pay a dodgy company to waste large amounts of money hiring staff and renting land so they can have a little do-nothing shopfront in LA somewhere. Slow-clap. I just hope the timing of your comment doesn't mean you're Australian.
smallmachine
8
Apr 13, 2016
yiriI think you are right to be angry about racism, no qualifiers.
If I am going to make a sizable investment in a product, I want to know that it will be supported if I have problems with it. The company's website is often a good place to start when making that judgement. I was surprised to see a website that was largely incomplete and unreadable; the seller had made minimal effort to make themselves accessible to the market they are trying to tap. As a potential consumer, I was turned off by a sense that I was on my own should any problems arise.
As someone who designs products that are manufactured abroad, I know exactly how unreliable "country of origin" is as an predictor of quality. It has been my pleasure to work engineers, vendors, and agents in China, Taiwan, and Thailand whose effort is reflected in the quality of their products. I have also, personally, been burned by bait and switch practices. I am not implying, nor was it my intention to imply, that S.M.S.L products are inferior in any way because of their place of manufacture.
It would be pretty crude to call a language gibberish, which is why I feel the need to clarify this point from my post: "large swaths of incomplete template website gibberish" was referring to the filler copy, in English, repeated on this incomplete page http://www.smsl-china.com/page51.html (Alternatively, search out the SMSL website and click on the "New Listing" tab)
yiri
237
Apr 14, 2016
smallmachineWell done.
No sarcasm, no bullshit, I mean it; 99 times in 100 people don't own their mistakes. Hell, online it'd be higher. There's no peer pressure, so there's no reason to do so, unless a sense that it's the right thing to do motivates you. That's honourable, well done.
I've seen companies get burned by overseas manufacture too. CW&T, one of my favourite design studios, had their Pen Type-A ripped off hugely by their contractor; well, actually it was the Americans handling the outsourcing that did the rip-off, but they now do all their manufacturing in the US. Lack of reputation is always a concern, but there's been a couple of products from SMSL that were well reviewed on head-fi etc, IIRC; and they've done a number of Massdrops without any major difficulties. Still, I understand where you're coming from, even if I dislike how you expressed it.
Phillay
15
Mar 13, 2017
yiriThis has honestly got to be the most mature argument/conversation I've ever read online. Not being sarcastic. Bravo to you both.
yiri
237
Apr 26, 2017
PhillayThank you, I appreciate the compliment. Have a nice day :)
pslayer1
274
Oct 19, 2018
smallmachineFor what it's worth, I purchased a VMV (SMSL) D1 DAC for ~$1300 (US) a couple of weeks ago. The DAC after broke the first day's use. I contacted the Chinese seller (SHENZENAUDIO) and... 1. They were very responsive to email 2. After a short Q and A session SHENZENAUDIO paid the shipping ($133) to have the faulty item shipped to their US address. 3. A brand new product was at my door step less than a week (shipped from China) after I shipped the faulty product back (so far so good on the replacement product).
My experience was a good one.... or service that one would expect. I would purchase products like this again given this experience. By the way, shipping was FREE and the manufacturer uses DHL Express service.
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