Peavey 6505 Cabinets Made in USA or China?

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johnnytuinals
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Peavey 6505 Cabinets Made in USA or China?

Post by johnnytuinals » Mon Oct 03, 2022 8:11 pm

I have a Peavey 6505 Slant that has 4 Sheffield speakers that I paid $399 with Free Shipping and NO tax from SamAsh about 10 years ago.
I think I used the 6505 once or twice because I also bought a few weeks later a Orange PCC412HP for $598 with free Shipping and No tax from MF......Think these Cabinets were cheap in price back in the day.
I have been looking on Ebay and seen these come with Celestion 30s nowadays and are being made in China.
The older 6505 comes with Sheffields and made in the USA.

Myself I am glad I got the Ones made in the USA
I am not sure that the Chinese are made any better?But thought that they were still made in the States butttt I guessed wrong....JT

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dak
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Re: Peavey 6505 Cabinets Made in USA or China?

Post by dak » Mon Oct 03, 2022 9:10 pm

Well, generally when production is transferred to a different factory, you start with new personnel and new experience. A country with different language makes it harder and more expensive to transfer knowledge. Typically you'll start with same-source parts and some larger quality issues, and then quality issues will get ironed out and part sources will likely get changed around. Some quality issues may depend on in-house expert knowledge and be hard to transfer. To some degree, you can expect cheap labor Far East countries to be able to work to tighter tolerances but with less of a clue just what tolerances matter and what may add up to be a problem cause.

Fixing things like "something buzzes" when something ends up almost touching may be more elusive to Far East QC than to U.S. workers who have no qualms taking a chisel to a wooden cabinet part that is too close to a transformer.

Then long-term production tends to lead to simplifications in the procedures, sometimes what you'd call "cutting corners", and the knowledge just what corners are a bad idea to cut may be more spotty with remote production to specs.

It depends on the business ties whether the long-term relations cause the workforce to be more qualified about what counts in what respect, but cheap labor countries may well have a larger fluctuation in work forces and whole facilities than what you'd see in Western countries.

One amusing anecdote I heard (which may or may not be true) is that in some high speed train tracks in the Far East built according to Western specs, there was a surprisingly high wear rate of the overhead lines and it took some time to figure out the cause, with the cause being that a spec of 200m distance between masts led to a distance of, well, repeatedly exactly 200.000m between masts, resulting in large-scale oscillations of the wires. So the specs needed to specify a pattern of variations in the distances to cater for the exaggerated precision of executing the instructions.

Of course, factory line work of unlearnt workers is no Chinese invention: blame Henry Ford (among others). How this reflects into product quality and just how processes are most effectively controlled then by people with more of an overview of the general product, is something that evolves.

Peavey is a company that grew from a small shop at its original site, so it has a continuity of passing knowledge on and developing processes for keeping quality in check with a growing workforce. For that reason more than the U.S./China difference, I'd likely have some preference to the "made in U.S.A." products. But I have no data to back up that hunch.

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