altruistic.lemon said:
All of which shows there's no such thing as a bargain in HiFi.
Totally agree, you don't get 'owt for nowt! You pays your money and takes your choice. Horses for courses!!!
I've still got my MF V-series and it's not bad at all. Perhaps the new one is a bit better, but the fact that they advertise a better looking case as the first selling point didn't tickle my fancy. In any case, the connections on the boxes mean that if you have a chain of 2 or 3 or these, you still end up having to hide them behind your rack!
I'm about to find out the truth about the resale value of MF
I would agree about some of the Chinese gear on the internet. It's not so cheap after customs and some of the stuff is a rip-off, fake chips even or valves that are just for show. But since Audio-gd are reputable and do actually have a UK distributor that offer 28 days sale or return, I thought I'd get one in to see. And surprise, surprise, it fixes what I perceived was the weakness with the older V-series.
I actually lucked out on the NFB-2, I ordered the NFB-3.1 but they'd just sold the last one a few minutes before I ordered. I was offered the better model at a bargain price, cheaper than getting it from China in fact, and it arrived the next day! That's great customer service in my opinion.
In contrast to this experience, I went to a UK hi-fi dealer for some speakers that were on ex-demo. I was pretty keen on them, but since they were still quite expensive and I would still lose money on a resale, I wanted a home demo. No go (I admit there are many good dealers in the UK and this is an isolated case). So I decided to upgrade the DAC first.
With a brand like Audio-gd, there's no dealer network/middlemen in the UK. They don't advertise. So those are real cost savings that can go straight into the components--it's not something for nothing.
