Not once in all five parts is “Chi-Fi” mentioned, which I find significant because there are so many here who use that term to connote ‘cheap and inferior’ and also quite a few who use it together with the mention of KZ as a pejorative to be superciliously dismissive.
Maybe I’m naive or don’t hang out in the right threads, but I’ve never seen ChiFi used as a derogatory term to mean cheap and inferior.
I’ve always just known it as referring to Chinese HiFi. In other words, when someone mentions ChiFi, everyone knows what they’re talking about. It’s like a shorthand way to refer to it.
Kind of like when we say “Google it”, that means do a web search even if not using the Google search engine. Or if someone says they “flew from New York to Chicago”, everyone knows they meant fly on an airplane and not a helicopter, hit air balloon, jet pack, or zeppelin.
In today’s world, literally 70-80% of all consumer products produced are made in China. It’s just a fact of life nowadays; I don’t think there’s anything inherently derogatory in it.
Of course there’s the occasional stereotype that pokes fun at some crawlity control problems. But products can have QC issues no matter where they are manufactured.
I guess you might be referring to the type of person that spends $6k on a set of IEMs. But those are the kind of people that have a derogatory outlook on everything, such as flying on a commuter airplane instead of a private Gulfstream IV, or driving a Toyota Camry instead of a chauffeured Rolls Royce, or eating Pho and a beer instead of lobster and caviar with Cristal.
The ironic thing about those type of people is that even if their $6k IEM isn’t “made in China”, guess where most of the raw components are made? The plastic pellets or aluminum used to make the shells, the silicone eartips, the nozzle screens, the litz wiring, the crossover circuit board, the individual crossover components, the mmcx or 2-pin sockets, the wire for the cable, the foam insert for the packaging, the printing ink for the labels, the adhesive for any stickers, the shrink wrap for the retail box, etc? Yup, you guessed it...