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when will china start copying MPC?

2K views 13 replies 11 participants last post by  SactoPete 
#1 ·
Nowadays china industry is killing alot of business.In electronics and almost everything they really copy and manufacture until the price when down more than 50 %. AND THEY SURE KNOW HOW TO CLONE>

I notice until now still no one really copy <exactly > a meyer bros or florida link.... So i wonder when china will start a mpc company that sell all the clonessssss.
 
#3 ·
Just out of curiosity, I picked up what looked kinda like a Guardala copy on eBay for 20 bucks. When it arrived, it wasn't really a copy of anything - although it does look like it takes some cues from a number of different pieces... the exterior would be closest to a Guardala or Brass Dukoff, and the baffle would be closest to a Ponzol (of the pieces I've seen).

I was a little surprised at how well finished it appeared to be... as good as any other factory piece I've seen, although I haven't measured out the facing etc. It plays decently (although it feels pretty closed) and is certainly nothing to sneer at. Pretty wild when you think about the price. I'm not sure whether to be happy at the near-term prospect of cheap, decent-quality gear, or sad at the prospect of commoditization of a craft and the possibility of long-established companies (including Selmer) facing life-threatening competition...

Pete
 
#4 ·
This thread got me thinking, so I pulled out the mouthpiece, and took some measurments using my friendly Mojo glass gauge and feeler gauges. Well, the facing curve, if you can call it that, is all over the place. It's amazing that the piece plays at all! The cuve basically extends all the way to the table, is uneven left-right, etc. My guess is someone "hand-finished" it with a belt sander... So, I take back what I said earlier, there's quite a ways to go for at least this one manufacturer's mouthpieces before these should be taken very seriously, I think.

But, as I said, it does play, and the general tone is OK. Makes a cheap blank, anyways! And it's so pretty and shiny ;-)

Pete
 
#5 ·
This thread got me thinking, so I pulled out the mouthpiece, and took some measurments using my friendly Mojo glass gauge and feeler gauges. Well, the facing curve, if you can call it that, is all over the place. It's amazing that the piece plays at all! The cuve basically extends all the way to the table, is uneven left-right, etc. My guess is someone "hand-finished" it with a belt sander... So, I take back what I said earlier, there's quite a ways to go for at least this one manufacturer's mouthpieces before these should be taken very seriously, I think.

But, as I said, it does play, and the general tone is OK. Makes a cheap blank, anyways! And it's so pretty and shiny ;-)

Pete
Well yea send it to Mojo let him open it up and do some of his belt sanding ;) and for pretty cheap you might have something pretty good. You gave me an idea, I've seen those types of pieces on ebay, I might do just that someday.
 
#7 ·
As said before, it's already happening. The problems associated with the manufacture of them are just what was said. My recommendation to the entrepreneur is to spend $500.00 on a herd of them, and then get them tweaked or refaced, put his name or brand on them and sell them FOR WHAT THEY ARE.

This could be a great opportunity for those on SOTW to get a hold of a lot of near-finished products and put their own names on them and make money if the mouthpiece finds market success.

If these things are plated with anything, once you breach that plating by refacing, you could have problems. That's easily solved by having the piece plated in rhodium at a jeweler's shop. I suspect that a lot of what passes as gold plate on most of the brass mouthpieces is just bright brass that has been given a light rhodium plating to maintain the shine.
 
#8 ·
It isn't in China's best interest to continue to flood the market, but what can western marketers do but to buy Chinese goods for resale when the Chinese Riminbi (yuan) is so grossly devalued?

As of today, the exchange rate of dollars to Riminbi is about 1 :12. (Actual value of the rmb today is a little over 7.97 cents). That means that one American dollar will buy about 12 Rmb. Compared to the Rmb, the dollar has HUGE buying power. The British Pound now has approximately DOUBLE the value of the USD, so its purchasing power is even greater. 1 BP to 16 Rmb.

As of today, China is mostly interested in putting its people to work to elevate them from the poverty that has persisted since feudal times. (Depending upon to whom you speak, those days began to come to a close with the passing of China's last emperor, Chairman Mao and the rise of Zhou En Lai).

Since the emphasis is on productivity, money is being DUMPED into capital improvements everywhere. Little Mom and Pop shops are being given money to expand their businesses from roll-up garage door businesses to glassed-in, glitzy, chi chi boutiques.

The same is happening in manufacturing. Compared to the Philip Morris cigarette manufacturing plant in Kannapolis, North Carolina, the plant in HuaiAn, PRC is a monster. The Chinese plant employs about 3,000-4,000 people who work around-the-clock, cranking out tobacco products faster than you can say Jackie Chan.

(Smokers: have you noticed that your favorite brand seems to be burning faster and has the strange smell of old tennis shoes?).

What's the quality of all of these mass-produced products? Those who comply with international standards are producing excellent products. For example: Chinese fire extinguishing products now put out fires rather than combusting upon being sprayed on a fire. (This is no joke. One manufacturer of extinguishing chemicals used acetone in its formula to make certain proteins break down. With no quality control, it once mass produced a boatload of this stuff with 10x the amount of required acetone which was put into hand held extinguishers and sold to restaurants. Can you say "Blackened Chinese Restaurant?).

What's happening now is that there are a lot of so-so- to pretty good Chinese products flooding the world market. In their rush to get to market, Chinese manufacturers try to meet basic requirements and nothing more. There's just no time for a plant that produces nearly a million musical instruments per year to spend time on "little" things like regulating a horn, checking the accuracy of the facing (if the facing stats are even known!). The Chinese manufacturing mindset is that the mouthpiece or sax meets minimum standards as required by the purchaser-exporter/importer and it's up to the foreign seller to add value to it by regulating it, replacing parts (such as the synthetic products used on Chinese horns) with traditional, western parts and materials).

One of the things which compounds the problem for the single-product buyer is that ON THE WHOLE, the domestic sellers aren't even opening the boxes when they arrive in their store. They are doing absolutely nothing to create value. So what the domestic consumer gets is a pretty good product which fails miserably to meet his expectations. Forget the fact that the product's value and performance could be enhanced greatly if the buyer would invest a little time and/or money into something that he paid so little for. The American consumer expects everything to be Perfect Right Out of the Box (PROB).

This won't happen for awhile. It took Japan almost thirty years to meet the western consumer's expectations. It took Taiwan a little less time to catch on because it took longer for Taiwan to get the capital to stand on its own twenty million feet and begin exporting after WWII. By then, it had a Japanese/American business model.

But to get back to the cheap Chinese mouthpiece. My recommendation is for you to send it to one of the artisans on the board and add value and playability to you incredibly inexpensive mouthpiece. Send it to Mojo Bari or one of the other refacers on this board to have it tweaked, and then send it to Jason Dumars to have it engraved. Voila! You'll have a Du Bari mouthpiece, the first in existence!

If you buy Chinese and buy blindly, be prepared for a surprise.

And be prepared to add value to the product yourself.

PS. I apologise for the length of my post. I also apologise for apparently hijacking the thread, but I think that the post has some relevance.
 
#9 ·
I've bought a couple of the brass copy pieces - an alto and a tenor - and the actual work is not too bad.

The alto piece is a copy of the JJ DV, not sure what the tenor piece is. While I don't know the measurements of the DV that Jody produces, this alto piece is well made and plays very nicely - to bright for my liking, but a nice player without any tweaking nonetheless. I'll probably open it up a bit to see what happens. It currently measures .083 at the tip with a facing length of .350 - give or take a bit since I'm not a pro at refacing. The tip and side rails were good.

The tenor, made by the same person, is a different story. With a tip of .083, the side rails were very uneven and the piece played with lots of squeaks. It will need a fair bit of work to get in good shape.

I'm happy with getting both these piece since they were cheap and it gives me a good brass blank to practice with. On that basis alone, they were worth the few bucks.

But, if anyone thinks they will get great pieces for real cheap, dream on. There is a reason that good refacers get a decent fee for their work. And while I wouldn't pay the price for some of the high end pieces that are available, these ain't in that class.

fwiw...
 
#13 ·
I've brought a few metal clarinet mouthpieces.

The brass clarinet mouthpices from ebay - musicalwheel
http://cgi.ebay.com/Clarinet-Metal-...hZ016QQcategoryZ47097QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem
have been great . Sound great for jazz. A strong bright sound.
Wide tip opening (2mm). Have a few of their gold and nickel ones.

Has seemed to last okay,no wear at all and I've been using one for the last six months as the everyday mouthpiece I use.
 
#14 ·
Well, on a long conference call today I did a rough re-face on the mouthpiece to get it more to playable specs, and while I haven't taken the time to get the tip, facing, etc. just right (and I'm not a pro refacer) but I did a quick playtest to get a better sense of what it'll sound like and my goodness it has a nice full edgy nasty tone. Not quite as bright as a dukoff D, but more edgy if you get my drift. Would be great for funk and blues.

Once I finish up getting the table and facing etc straightened out I'll post some pics and sound samples.... but I think BlooDog had a good point, there's some assembly required.

And FWIW, it looks like it was indeed gold plated, as when I was doing the reface, as when the gold was worked away it exposed a silver (in color anyways) plating underneath, then brass...

Cheers,

Pete
 
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