Best American Made Audio Electronics

[Guest]

Vizio made in USA? A US corp, yes. Made in USA NOT! I see you don't actually say Made in USA. Mr. Wang's intention was to cause the thought but never says it. It really is time for us to demand US and North American made products and I support those dealers that focus primarily on US and North American MADE products. I found 2 dealers in the USA that focus on this concept. One is LMC Home Entertainment in Scottsdale Arizona and The Source A/V Design Group in Torrance, California

 

[James]

A few years ago I bought a B&K receiver. It was beautiful and it sounded nice. The magazines were raving about the American-made product and B&K's alliance with Motorola in testing processing chips. I spent a lot of money on the receiver and expected to have a high-performance piece of equipment. The problem was the receiver would freeze up while booting. Yes. It actually had to load up like a computer. B&K offered a lifetime warranty at the time. I had to pack it up and send it in for repair two times in one year. They were friendly and prompt but I never liked that the unit kept breaking down, leaving me without the heart of my system. After I got it back from the factory the second time I sold it and bought a Denon. The Denon has worked flawlessly for years. The denon cost much less and performed just as well as the B&K. I really wanted the US product to be great but it just did not live up to expectations.

 

[Rickideemus]

I'm not a great flag waver. Sorry, but the U.S. is NOT an especially remarkable country. We're not the longest lived, we don't have the highest standard of living, we certainly never had the best health care system in the world. (I can't imagine how THAT myth got started.) We do have a fairly "productive" work force -- no where near as high as Luxembourg or Norway, but better than average. But that is based on the value of our dollar which is higher than it should be, by any rational measure. I've been trying to put this together for years: as mediocre as we are, how do we get by as well as we do?

Suppose a dude with lots of cash gets shipwrecked on an island with a bunch of po folk. Rich guy refuses to work-- at all. He just pays all the flunkies around him to set him up with a house, clothes, electricity, food ... all the amenities. Meanwhile, po folk live in squalor. Why is the cash all that valuable to those people? They live on an island!!

I'm not an economics professor. I'm a simple man with simple ideas. Here's the explanation I've come up with: we play nice with one another. We're able to tolerate multiple races, cultures, view points and religions without blowing each other up. That, and the fact that, mainly due to distance, for 120 years we've been able to fight all our major wars on foreign soil. Because we play nice with one another, we have good infrastructure -- good highways, roads, delivery systems and merchant outlets -- so we are efficient consumers and the whole world lines up to sell us their wares, even though we no longer produce a %&^! thing.

Now, some twelve years ago we had a little taste of war on our own soil. 9/11. In my view we vastly overreacted to it, and for that reason, we now suffer from an intractable recession... "War on terror." Right. Let's have a war against a state of mind... "War on terrorism." Even better. Let's wage war on a tactic of war... Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but it was part of "the war on terror." OK, fine. But once we got Hussein we should have vamoosed like a centipede off a hot rock. (Cheney: "If you break it, you own it." Huh?? We broke Iraq by ridding them of a brutal dictator???) We lost some 500 soldiers ousting Hussein and some 4,000, and close to a trillion dollars (much more, if you count interest) "fixing" something that won't, and can't, stay fixed. (Let's not even mention the extra 150,000 to 600,000 Iraqi casualties, depending on who you ask.)

We vastly overreacted to an attack on U.S. soil because we're not used to it. This does not bode well for our future as rich island guy. Maybe we should start learning how to make stuff again.

Rick