Cheap capacitors from China ..to good to be true?

Guess in the old days, they were providing more information on the part if they were counterfeiting a component. found a suspect one in my Luxman

Could be. Vintage power semiconductors are a whole other issue. Obsolete "unobtanium" parts have wider margins.

Which one, though? The NEC stamped one?

I believe it's likely that the caps are genuine Vishay/ERO based on the physical properties that are indicative of the manufacturing process, and pictures of similar Vishay caps.

I just don't see why you'd fake an old cap that isn't some kind of special sauce part for some particular fender amp or something.

http://www.humblehomemadehifi.com/Cap.html

http://www.sm-elektronik.pl/index.php?p453,6-8uf-250v-osiowy-vishay-kondensator-mkt

We're talking about parts that were manufactured in the millions and ordered in the hundreds of thousands to millions.

As recently as 10 years ago, Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola) wasn't bothering to design/develop and manufacture anything if there wasn't already a contract in place to sell a million of them. It didn't matter how clever or revolutionary of an idea you had - you had to have someone on the hook to purchase a million before they would budget a dime. I presume this is still true but haven't talked to my contacts at freescale in a long time.

If someone offers you a rocking great deal on a part that is sought after and has been out of production for 30 years, there's a fair chance that it's fake or used.

This is not one of those parts.

I have one of the legendary signetics ne5532 chips, pulled from usa-made vintage equipment, and i don't think it sounds any better than the philips chips i bought on ebay out of singapore. but i was never a fan of the 5532.

Ericj, the time frame was 7-10 days. Pretty quick, to NYC, where I lived at the time. And it was, or appeared to be mailed directly, with postage. I doubt it came on a ship.

I bought a USB card reader from China for 39 cents delivered. Isn't 39 cents below the price of a stamp? When they have excess they let it go, but this unit was not an old chunk of veryrarium but a cheap reader that was probably only a few bucks retail.

I have no idea how they do it, but maybe they don't have to pay any postage to get the container of packages to the US into the USPS where there would be the standard international mail pricing agreement between countries that would need to be paid.

ericj said:

You're blowing it way out of proportion.



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The "buy american" sentiment is fine, but when americans are just paying the chinese to make everything, I feel no need to pay more middle men.

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It's not "buy American" so much as "don't buy from shady sellers that ignore basic patent and fraud laws". With established companies getting products manufactured in China, at least you know that basic human rights and laws have been observed. With these generic sellers, you've got no idea whether child labor was involved, or what the lead content(and any other dangerous outlawed material) in these thousands of generic products.

Why give money to criminal activity that harms legitimate business? Why give money to companies that use child or slave labor, just so you can save a few cents?

runnin' said:

It's not "buy American" so much as "don't buy from shady sellers that ignore basic patent and fraud laws". With established companies getting products manufactured in China, at least you know that basic human rights and laws have been observed. With these generic sellers, you've got no idea whether child labor was involved, or what the lead content(and any other dangerous outlawed material) in these thousands of generic products.

Why give money to criminal activity that harms legitimate business? Why give money to companies that use child or slave labor, just so you can save a few cents?

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I think you're overestimating the will and ability of "legitimate" businesses to avoid sourcing components from companies that use child and slave labor just to save a few cents.

Also, overestimating the nature of small-time ebay vendors.

There are a few factories that sell direct on ebay. I bought a bunch of LEDs from Chi-Wing for example. But for the most part, these guys are cottage industry. Just a few people working together, sometimes one person doing it alone, wheeling and dealing to acquire merchandise and then sell it.

Like any other retail business, it's a matter of buying low and selling high.

And stuff really is that much cheaper in china. They buy very, very low. Usually leftovers from large production runs. What do you suppose they are supposed to do when they needed 900,000 of something to fulfill an order but the price break was so good at 1,000,000? The excess parts get sold out the back door.

You see a criminal enterprise, I see a small businessman trying to get ahead.

Sorry, but I still think that American companies are going to be more willing to obey American law than Chinese fly-by-night operators. That's all I'm saying here. These cottage industry Chinese operators are indeed going to buy their parts as cheaply as they can in China. And do you think those particular cheapest manufactured parts are going to come from above board(so to speak) factories in China? The ones that pay their workers fairly, don't use slave labor, have labor safety standards in place? Of course not.

Whenever an American clothier is found to have used sweat shops or some other means, the fallout is very damaging to their bottom line so they do tend to want to avoid that. These Chinese ebay sellers launder the dirty parts so a third party like you can have a degree of separation from the abuses. Fill your boots, I guess.

Here's what's on Monoprice's webpage in regards to this matter:

Effective January 1, 2012, the California Transparency in Supply Chains of Act of 2010 (SB 657) (hereafter called the "Act") requires retailers and manufacturers doing business in the State of California with more than $100 million in worldwide gross receipts to disclose efforts to eliminate slavery and human trafficking from its direct supply chain of tangible goods offered for sale. Monoprice's suppliers (hereafter called "Suppliers") commit, in all of their activities, to operate in full compliance with the laws, rules, and regulations of the countries in which they operate. Monoprice has implemented a Supplier Code of Conduct (hereafter called the 'Code') to ensure Suppliers adhere to these requirements.

*shrug* american companies are buying their parts as cheaply as they can in China.

More than $100M in receipts is a lot of business. That also says direct supply chain, so they are welcome to buy from middle men who buy from bad factories. This looks like a toothless feel-good regulation to me.

Apple has enough sway to assure that sort of thing and does a so-so job.

American companies know full well that products sold in the US have to meet American standards, not Chinese standards. Again, the fall out from having substandard products in the US ruins a bottom line, and the law suits start up.

No company wants the bad press, the fines, the legal entanglements or the product failures. Buy the cheap ass third party chinese parts if you want to, but trying to say that everyone does it is a bit of a stretch.

runnin' said:

American companies know full well that products sold in the US have to meet American standards, not Chinese standards. Again, the fall out from having substandard products in the US ruins a bottom line, and the law suits start up.

No company wants the bad press, the fines, the legal entanglements or the product failures. Buy the cheap ass third party chinese parts if you want to, but trying to say that everyone does it is a bit of a stretch.

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We're talking about a film capacitor here. Not an infant's teething toy.

as for other parts - I really doubt that there are meaningful differences between the epoxy-dipped ceramic caps i buy from mouser and the epoxy-dipped ceramic caps i buy from random chinese people.

When i buy, say, a kit to build a subwoofer preamp board, my general guess is that the Pioneer branded caps with short leads are at best leftovers from a run of pioneer products and at worst possibly pulled from defective boards, but the cap tester says they are just fine - sized as marked and good low ESR - so i use them.

The RC4558 opamp in it is old and has solder on the leads and is an rc4558 so i set it aside and use an njm2068dd from mouser instead - 28 cents well spent! maybe someone I know has a tube screamer and would like a corny old used Harris RC4558 from the 70's or 80's.

On the other hand yeah if they offer you an Alps blue potentiometer for $2 it's fake. If the chip looks like it's been sanded or painted and then rubber stamped it's fake. If the tripath chip was produced in korea it was produced illegally.

US companies try to avoid international embarrassment but most of them do it by assuring plausible deniability.

If you think that publicly traded companies feel any obligation to anyone but their shareholder and have a morality past the bottom line on their quarterly report, you're living in a dream world.

I'm talking about a principle here, I thought that was obvious. Again, buy whatever you want. But to suggest that American companies are commonly buying substandard parts and materials with the above listed outcomes I listed is a stretch.

I believe echowars would have a thing or two to say about the fact that there are American companies selling counterfeits from china, or elsewhere. It has cost him some embarrassment and cost in the past. The point is, don't take a chance with your coveted equipment and buy from known legitimate American companies that stand behind their products.

runnin' said:

I'm talking about a principle here, I thought that was obvious. Again, buy whatever you want. But to suggest that American companies are commonly buying substandard parts and materials with the above listed outcomes I listed is a stretch.

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it appears that you believe that a preponderance of chinese-made components are substandard or otherwise nefariously manufactured?

if so, on what do you base that belief?

and for what market are those items produced?

What I'm saying is, yeah, in asia and particularly in mainland china there exists a counterfeiting industry. They have some weird cultural norms and laws about that -- for example the Ferrari Motors trademark in China would only apply to cars, and you would be perfectly within your rights to sell Ferrari Bubblegum with a stallion on the label.

And yes, they have a disturbing "same-same" concept that isn't quite what we would think of as actually making an accurate facsimile of something.

But, I know people who were born and raised in Beijing and immigrated to the USA.

And I'm here to tell you, whether or not the proposed statistic of 9 out of 10 Yamaha motorcycles in china being fake is true or not, 99% of chinese people riding fake Yamaha motorcycles were never under the impression that they were buying the genuine Japanese article.

And that if there is an asian businessman who is ruining your local economy, he is doing it either by the enticement of or expressly at the directive of a western, generally white businessman, here in the USA or in Europe.

Because we are the target market.

Also, I virtually guarantee that the capacitors linked in the 1st post are genuine. The price is nowhere near strange. At 80 cents each i would wonder.

KingBubba said:

I believe echowars would have a thing or two to say about the fact that there are American companies selling counterfeits from china, or elsewhere. It has cost him some embarrassment and cost in the past. The point is, don't take a chance with your coveted equipment and buy from known legitimate American companies that stand behind their products.

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True enough, it's not rocket science.

I need to say this really sounds impressive (if true, which I tend to believe).

Quote:

Only quality can lead ISC marketing to success. No quality, no customers.

I know from experience how very very true this is. So I guess the whole idea is to find a way to weed out the crap.

Hi Jeroen, sometimes you see something about their quality being questioned, at least when you ever buy at Reichelt, they have different price for ON Semicondutor sometimes 2:1 versus ISC for the few audio transistors they have.
I have a few ics transistors in house and while I do not trust them (yet) I think one time I'll do a destructive AB test with other transistor.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I think I did not see this brand at the major distributors, while they are on the hobby market...
A defective amp i bought found several drivers transistors totally shorted all three pins together thats when I got alarmed. Usually one of the junctions survive (on the average) and after that I start googling this brand. got some answers on the green and blue Dutch forums more people do not trust them.

Hi Gerard. I am looking for some MJ2501/3001 darlington transistors for a Philips MFB system and indeed came at Reichelt, they sell them quite cheap. Apparently they don't mind mentioning them being ISC produced, so I looked up this manufacturer. Of course I know a word is not the same as the actual reality, but still.

It would be very nice if indeed you could do a test on these transistors you have. Is it all marketing crap (i.e. lies) or are they indeed producing ok products for a very nice price?

If I'd really think in conspiracies, why wouldn't it be possible the big guys arranging the sale of counterfeits for the sole purpose of seeding fear and trying in this way killing startups and smaller companies?

(BTW, the picture of the factory is made wider, either with photoshop or a wide angle lens)

Does anyone remember the big computer capacitor debacle that caused motherboards by the millions to fail? Enough said.