I found this excerpt very interesting from the article:
"Our real marketplace is the middle market - the step up from the mass-market product. Many clients want to step from the entry-level Asian brands to a higher quality product. And they dont want to spend the same amount of money it takes to buy a vacation home to do it.
Parasound should be filling this niche. B&K is no longer in business. [Editor's Note: B&K is actually owned by ATI and is in business.] Sunfire has ceded the market. I hate to say it, but where are the high-end Harman brands? These are the companies that should have filled the void but have not. Thats our sweet spot."
When it comes to smaller volumes, there are many small audio shops in the US that are making audio products at great price points and of really good quality - Salk, Rogue, Vapor, Selah to name a few. I'm not sure which Chinese option would give the same quality even at the same price point.
Then, there are other interesting companies like
American Giant. It turns out that the overhead of American labor is not that much, given sufficient automation and sufficient thought.
I do want to say that I found this thread, old as it is, in really poor taste. Why create a thread to trash a company, that too when the OP had no personal reason to dislike the Emotiva products? Frankly, it sounded like the OP was a audio dealer of some sorts whose business was getting hit because of Emotiva, and wanted to tarnish Emotiva's name as a result. I can even get that, but the way he did it was in bad taste, IMHO. He could have very well focused on other aspects -such as the disadvantages of buying online, the benefits of buying from a dealer, etc.
For what it is worth, I have been completely satisfied with my Emotiva USP-1 pre-amp purchase. Although it has its drawbacks and I've always felt the USP-1 was a bit bright in certain frequencies, it really did open up the sound, has great soundstage, clarity, separation etc., and at the end of the day, you're getting a whole lot for your money.