thecr4ne said:
There is a lot of talk about improving quality control from China, and many gear manufacturers will frankly remind folks that most things are made in China, and maybe overseen or assembled in US/Europe, wherever.
So what's your experience? Have you had great successes or massive failures buying no-name components from Aliexpress instead of the trusted names from trusted sources like Mouser and Digikey? Are there specific components you are or aren't comfortable sourcing on the cheap? Anyone done head to head measurements?
I welcome your input.
I wouldn't ever buy no name electronic components from anywhere...
People tend to make sweeping generalizations about made in china but you rarely get more than you pay for, often less, so why buy cheap anything?
In large scale manufacturing pennies matter but even then component sourcing requires sampling and sometimes even production tests. I had one very annoying purchasing puke trying to get me to give engineering approval for his new cheaper vendor for potentiometers. He might have been saving a penny or two each, but when you use millions of components it can add up. He was motivated to win a cost saving award, I was motivated to get him off my back, but i still refused to approve his part without a 1,000 piece production test... Inside mixers that use tens of pots each, this was not a huge production test, but enough to reveal that his new cheaper pots were not up to the task. The factory line workers who had to remove and replace 1,000 pots were not very happy with me, so I invited the purchasing agent to visit the factory with me during my weekly visit, so they would know who to blame.
In the course of sourcing/approving Chinese contract manufacturers to build Peavey SKUs last century, I spent some time in Hong Kong and mainland China, kicking the tires inside a few factories. Of course they didn't show me anything bad but if anything their ISO 9000 factory was spectacularly clean and delivering PPM reject level quality.
You get what you specify... For Peavey our contract manufactures only used components we specified and approved, built to the same standards we used inside the US. The China factory was UL certified just like our US factories.
JR