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 companies—most of which I’d never heard of—making 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 build—the 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.

Next: China’s Domestic Offerings

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