The board porn photo show that the PWB was made by Allfavor, a Chinese company. Is this a new trend for these products to contain costs?
The PCB is assembled in Nevada from a kit sourced by us with a US- and UK-based strategic partner.
It's possible that the Nevada assembly house is using a Chinese-made PC board, but the PCB isn't being assembled in China. Alex selected this company from a short list of candidates, and has verified they actually produce our products in their factory. He was just out there on Monday.
That said, we'll contact them and see why they aren't using a US-based company, like most of our other products, but I suspect they are outsourcing the boards for cost reasons. (Which happens even at many US PCB manufacturers as well, sigh.)
For those of you wondering what all of this is about, there are many ways to have products made:
1. Buy the product from an ODM in China, complete down to the shipping box. Boxes show up on your doorstep, you ship them out, you support them. You need to have 100% confidence that your design will be produced as intended--no counterfeit parts, no quality slip-ups on the chassis side, etc. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but you're not going to claim "Made" or "assembled' in USA on this one.
2. Buy a finished, stuffed PCB from an assembly house in China, and mate it with a chassis (also maybe from China, Malaysia, Mexico, wherever). You screw it together. Again, you have to have confidence that no fake parts are going on the PCB, etc. Again, nothing wrong with this approach. This is also legit "Assembled in USA."
What we do:
3. Provide a kit of components sourced from the actual suppliers (Vishay, Nichicon, Alps, etc.) to a US-based assembly house, either in California or Nevada. Much of the time we also provide the PCB. In some cases, we provide the assembly house with the PCB files so they can "panelize" the boards to fit their exact requirements in order to keep costs down. We then take in the finished PCBs, test them, mate them with chassis that are produced literally minutes away from us in California. If the PCB has transformers on it, or if there are transformers in the chassis, they are also made in California. Then, after assembly, everything is tested on instruments (Avermetrics, etc) and is listened to. Anything $199 and above gets 1-4 days of burn-in and is tested again.
This is ALSO legit "Assembled in USA." This is, however, NOT "Made in USA," because we cannot tell you that literally every resistor came from the USA. Yes, this matters to the FTC.
You can also go beyond what we do, and make your own chassis in house, heck, you can make your own PC boards. Heck, there are tube amp companies that make their own transformers. That's called vertical integration. There's nothing wrong with that.
But, here's the kicker: you could be making your own boards, chassis, and transformers...and you STILL can't claim "Made in USA!"
Why? Any manufacturer that cannot prove that
literally everything--the cold rolled steel in the chassis, the plastic in the knob, the thin-film resistors on the board, all of it comes from the USA, cannot say "Made in the USA," per the FTC. So if you're making your own transformers, but the laminations come from China, well, that's not made in USA. Or worse, your lamination supplier changed to a Chinese source and didn't tell you. Yeah.
Hope that clears things up!