The GuangZhou Hi-Fi Show

Posted by: Robert Harley at 8:08 am, December 3rd, 2007

December 3 - China's booming economy and rise as an exporting giantare having an increasingly important effect on the audio industry. The influence is two-fold. First, Chinese audio factories are turning out high-quality products in every category at prices that U.S. and European manufacturers can't match.

Second, China's growing middle and upper classes now have the means to buy quality hi-fi, not just from domestic manufacturers, but from those same U.S. and European companies with which the local factories compete. The bottom line is that China is producingâand consumingâan increasingly large share of the world's hi-fi.

These trends were on vivid display at the GuangZhou AV Fair. I'm on a ten-day trip through China, starting with three days at the GuangZhou show followed by visits to hi-fi factories in GuangZhou, Shanghai, and Beijing.

In this first installment of my trip blog, I'll give you a tour of the show's highlights. After attending the opening ceremonies I got my first look at the hi-fi scene in China.

The country holds a number of hi-fi exhibitions, but the GuangZhou show is the largest, most prominent, and most prestigious. Consequently, virtually every manufacturer in China and every distributor of foreign-made gear converge on the magnificent Whit Swan hotel, home of the show since the event's inception 14 years ago.

This year's show hosted 150 exhibitors in 160 rooms, and was expected to attract more than 25,000 attendees, each of whom paid 50 RMB (about $7.75) to see and hear the latest gear.

The strategy for covering a show like this is simple; Start early, take a mid-day break, and go back in the afternoon. From about 1pm to 4pm the hallways and rooms are simply too dense with people to see or hear anything.

Twenty-five thousand people spread over six floors (plus an outlying area for CD and LP sales) makes for tight quarters. For comparison, the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest garners roughly the same number of exhibitors spread out over a larger area, and attracts about 4000 attendees.

The most striking thing about the GuangZhou show and, by extension, the hi-fi scene in China, is the sheer number of companiesâmost of which I'd never heard ofâmaking tubed amplifiers. Room after room was filled with tubed gear of varying build-quality, from simple and inexpensive units like an 18Wpc unit with a USB drive that sells for 1450 RMB (about $200), to lavish monoblocks with stunning cosmetics, beautiful build-quality, and point-to-point hand-wiring.

China must be dotted with small factories turning out tubed amplifiers, most of them for domestic consumption.

There's a reason tubes are so popular in everything from entry-level gear to esoteric models: There's a huge disparity between the costs of labor and raw materials in China. Labor is cheap, but parts cost about the same as they would anywhere in the world. But if you make your own tubes with hand-assembly, tubed amplifiers suddenly become less expensive to manufacture than transistor amps.

In addition, tube amplifiers are simpler to design and buildâthe circuit designs are often taken right out of a textbook. It all adds up to about a 10:1 ratio between tubed and solid-state gear from Chinese manufacturers.

Some Chinese brands are well known to U.S. audiophiles for their entry-level, high-value products. But the companies making these budget components also produce a much larger range of products for their domestic market.

Many of these items are quite ambitious and esoteric, and sold under a different name. For example, the company that builds the excellent Cayin products distributed in the U.S. by Acoustic Sounds is called Spark in China. You wouldn't know it from the entry-level Cayin gear, but Spark makes a panoply of elaborate preamps, monoblock power amplifiers, and CD players.

Similarly, the brand called Vincent in the U.S. (winner of our 2007 Power Amplifier of the Year Award, available through Audio Advisor) is made by a company called Sheng Ya. In its exhibit, Sheng Ya showed some stunning-looking monoblocks that produced a wonderful sound driving B&W 800D loudspeakers.