有资深音响评论人----Wes Phillips 于2005参观ＩＡＧ在深圳的工厂后写得一篇文章供大家参考
China, My China
It all started, as do so many things in my life, over dinner. While www.stereophile.com's web-monkey Jon Iverson and I were covering the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show for the website, we cadged a meal ticket off IAG's vice president of sales and marketing, Jim Knight, and product manager Julian Maddock.
A little eatin', a little drinkin'...and the next thing you know we were talkin' bidniss.
"IAG," I said, enunciating carefully—harder than it sounds after two courses and a few glasses of Bonny Doon Critique of Pure Riesling (love that name). "I know the company bought Wharfedale and Quad, but I don't really know very much else. Who are you guys?"
"IAG was founded by the Chang brothers, Bernard and Michael," Julian said. "Their company, Sanecore, made a lot of money importing karaoke gear into China when Deng eased up trade restrictions. Later, when local manufacturers started competing with the equipment they were importing, they decided to explore the long-term possibilities of manufacturing world-class equipment in China."
I knew what that meant: cheap labor. However, to paraphrase businessman Bob Dylan, I was drinking their wine, so I remained silent. But not inscrutable, apparently—about 10 days later, Jim Knight called me and asked, "How would you like to examine IAG's manufacturing facilities?"
I was dubious. The trip from Brooklyn to China is a long one, and I'd already made up my mind. But, as they say, it's what you learn after you know it all that's important. I signed on.
Did I say a long trip?
Try two hours to Chicago, another 17 to Hong Kong, and then an hour's drive to the factory site in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. On top of that, we lost another day to the International Dateline (recaptured on the return trip). We arrived in darkness, so my first sight of life in China was a series of magic-lantern tableaux as we drove past cafes, stores, and diners filled with people—watching TV, mostly.
In the haze of the morning, China sits on eternity
The next morning I woke early, wandered outside my room, then down a corridor of bamboo before catching sight of an open vista. Everything stopped for one breathtaking moment. I was looking across a lake that reflected rocky, scrub-grown hills and early morning mists straight out of a Taoist landscape. Holy cow—I was in China.
It was the China of my dreams. I can't begin to number all of the hours I've spent gazing at the Chinese art in the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC, but until that moment it had never occurred to me that artists of the Qing dynasty were realists. It really looks like this, I marveled. [WP's scrapbook of China photos can be found here.—Ed.]
Then I heard a table saw rip into some heavy timber. I turned in the other direction and my jaw dropped again. The IAG industrial park resembled a small city. How big is it? Well, what time is it now? IAG's official estimate is a million square feet of factory floor, but I walked through several newly completed, hangar-sized buildings and saw at least another five under construction—one of them six stories tall. The entire time I was there, trucks full of raw materials were trundling onto the site, some filled with supplies for the factory, but just as many toting concrete and rebar. I walked by a crew of masons beginning to construct a wall one day; the next morning, I watched a crew slapping paint on the completed and skim-coated finished product.
Then there were the 20 buildings that were fully operational. IAG claims its Shenzhen factory is one of the largest custom-designed electronics facilities in the world. I believe it. So forgive me if I disbelieve the million-square-foot figure, but that seems so yesterday.
IAG's manufacturing facilities are ISO 9001 certified, which means that they meet strict international standards for quality control and quality assurance. Everywhere I went within the plant, QC engineers were checking the output of that section's floor crew. That means that a part is made, and it's checked. That part gets incorporated into an assembly, and the assembly is checked. That assembly gets incorporated into a subassembly, and then that's checked—as is the final product. Everywhere I went in the plant, the noise of manufacture was accompanied by the electronic swoops and burbles of the quality-control crew's test gear.
One of the most impressive sights on my rounds, in fact, was the sample room, which contains a calibrated, second-generation reference sample of every driver IAG makes. ("Second-generation" means the first real product run after a prototype has been approved.) These are signed and dated by members of the R&D department, run by Steve Hewlett—IAG's chief of engineering and a longtime driver magician, formerly of Celestion—and random samples of each run are taken offline and compared to the reference samples to ensure consistency.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
As we walked (and walked and walked) to the first building on our tour, Steve Hewlett recited a few statistics. The 1500 employees are pretty evenly divided between the sexes, and that new six-story building we saw being erected was the future woodshop facility. And everything has been built without a mortgage or the burden of debt. The Changs put a lot of their money where their mouths are, and they bet it all on the future. That's thinking long-term.
IAG makes Wharfedale and Quad, but also Apogee lighting, Wharfedale Pro (mixers and DJ speakers), Airedale (loudspeakers aimed at the Japanese market), Leak (another classic British marque, currently producing primarily for the Asian market), and Quad Industrial (architectural speakers).
As we walked, I noticed a groundsman sweeping up debris and dumping it into a box labeled Vox Valve Reactor Amplifier. I took a photo of it—I've always been mad about the chimey AC-30—and Hewlett casually said, "We make those here. Would you like to see the assembly line?"
Of course I did. But jeez, you must be busy when you forget to mention an entire brand.
Clocks ticking slowly, dividing up the day
Properly speaking, the tour began in the tool-and-die works. If IAG's facility is about anything, it's about vertical integration, which to them is such a religion that I'm not entirely sure it starts in the factory. But I do know that the Changs set up the IAG tool works as a separate facility whose overhead is a fixed cost across all the product lines. This means that when any company's designer wants to employ a new part, there's no disincentive to specifying a new one. Making the special tooling to produce it doesn't add a penny (yuan?) to a division's bottom line—and hey, you've got to keep those machinists busy.
As a driver designer, Steve Hewlett was quite chuffed about this. "If I need a different cone flare or dream up a new motor assembly, I can draw it up and walk the plans over here from my office in a few minutes. And these guys give me a prototype to play with fast. In the UK, you'd be talking about a six-month lead time on something like that."
Of all the milling, cutting, and punching machines on the shop floor, my favorite was the press that turns huge rolls of steel into huge rolls of perforated speaker grille. Think of a locomotive-sized pasta press and you're pretty much there.
Another fascinating experience was watching a crew at work on the casting molds for a new remote control. Most companies have to choose from a stock remote pattern; it was impressive to see someone actually making one—or should I say, making the part that would make one?
After the tool-and-die works, we tromped through several facilities that make the component parts that later get stuffed into finished products: PCBs, control knobs, chassis, faceplates, stamped covers, molded shells, and drivers, drivers, drivers—more than 600 models.
There was quite a mix of high and low tech. We watched crucibles of molten aluminum being cast into speaker baskets—and at 700o Fahrenheit, that's impressive—and watched guys feeding sheets of fiber into vats of pulp slurry to make paper speaker cones. "We've even discovered a special kind of wood here in China that makes for a far better driver," Hewlett said. "Sorry, but it's a secret."
I watched injection-molding machines the size of boxcars making huge speaker cabinets for the Wharfedale Pro line, and guys with 3' bench planes create the longest, thinnest curls of hardwood imaginable as they prepared the clinker-built underlayer of a curvilinear Wharfedale Opus 3 loudspeaker for its veneer—technology that Thomas Jefferson would have felt at home with.
I was also hypnotized by the crew that was putting piano-lacquer finishes on speakers in one of the finishing rooms. I've pulled a certain amount of lacquer myself, enough to recognize that these cats were good.
"Actually," Julian Maddock told me, "that's a pretty good insight into how the Changs operate. When we first thought of offering a lacquer finish, we were concerned that it must be absolutely of the highest quality, so we searched around for the best local company and hired them. When we were convinced that they could consistently meet our quality standards, the Changs bought the company and moved it on-site."
Actually, that's sort of how it worked with Quad, too.
Quad, of course, like Wharfedale, has roots that stretch back to the dawn of British hi-fi—in Quad's case, all the way back to 1936. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, Quad's relentless innovation flagged under what many feel to be an acquisition that was not sympathetic to the firm's history or corporate culture. Many observers feared that IAG's purchase of Quad would be more of the same.
"Even I was concerned about that," Julian Maddock said. "I reckoned that if I was going to stick around, they'd have to convince me they were serious about re-establishing Quad as an authentic high-end company."
And?
"I'm still here."
I've wandered around and you're still here
When IAG moved Quad's manufacturing to Shenzhen, it didn't just build a new assembly line. Actually, it couldn't—some of the equipment used to make the electrostatic panels was one-of-a-kind. Like the panel-stretching machine that puts the Mylar under tension when affixing it to the strut structure—a gizmo dubbed "Mr. Stretchy" by the ladies who'd operated it in Huntingdon, England. So IAG packed it up and shipped it off.
"Of course," Steve Hewlett said, "it was never meant to travel, so it shook itself to pieces on the trip over here. The big problem in putting it back together is that it used a pneumatic control system—it was built way before digital—and that's technology that predates almost any engineers still working today. Fortunately, I studied a bit of it in school and I took tons of photos before we disassembled it, so we were able to get it up and running. Eventually."
IAG also shipped out a bunch of longtime Quad service staff from Huntingdon, folks such as Paul McConville (30+ years), Ken Bunting (30+ years), and a relative newcomer, Rob Flain (15+ years). They stayed until they were satisfied that the new plant was making Quad products as well as they themselves had always done.
IAG oversaw the upgrade to the ESL-988 from the ESL-63, as well as the introduction of the big-gun ESL-989. It also brought the new 99 series of components to fruition, including a very nifty $1049 CD player with variable line out, digital switching, and digital inputs, a sample of which I immediately requested for review. What really thrilled me was seeing on the assembly line the legendary Quad II monoblocks (now called the Quad II Classic, $1349.99/pair). "Not original spec," Julian said, "because you just can't get a lot of those parts any more—but we spent a lot of time voicing them to sound like the originals, while taking advantages of advances in parts quality." There's a matching Quad 99 preamp ($899.99), as well as a new, higher-output tube amp, the Quad II-40 ($1799.99/pair). Now there's even a brand-new tube preamp, the QC-24 ($899.99), which uses a special milspec miniature dual-triode tube soldered directly to its circuit board.
"Wow, " I said to Julian. "What's the tube life on that baby?"
"We're not sure. We've never managed to exhaust one."
And yes, there are moving-coil speakers in the Quad line these days. "Not everybody has the space for the ESLs," Julian said. "For instance, even hard-core 989 owners probably can't employ even a pair of 988s in their bedroom systems—or in the rear channels of their home cinema systems—so we needed to face the reality of the marketplace. But we also had to make sure the 11Ls were true to the Quad identity, not to mention completely differentiated from, say, our Wharfedale compact monitors."
A lot of people think they've succeeded. The UK's What Hi-Fi/Sound & Vision awarded the Quad 11L their Product of the Year award in 2002 and 2003.
You may be wondering why I'm devoting so much space to Quad when IAG makes many other marques. Partially, I suppose, it's because it was exposure to a pair of ESL-57s that sparked my love—actually, my awareness—of the High End. Also, what I saw in IAG's attention to the Quad ethos applied to its other brands as well—but I'll spare you the brand-by-brand blow-by-blow. Let the part stand for the whole.
By the time we'd made it through the Quad part of the factory, we'd been walking for close to three hours and were wearing out. But I wasn't ready to quit. "I want to see you making Vox AC-30s," I whined as the lunch siren sounded.
"Too late," Steve said. "Everyone will be at lunch for the next two hours."
Two hours? It turns out No?l Coward wasn't making it up about it being only mad dogs and Englishmen that go out in the midday sun of the tropics. Fortunately, Steve Hewlett is an Englishman, so I convinced him to tramp up another three flights of stairs to show me the Vox assembly line, if not any actual assembly.
There, I discovered my dream job.
In a little soundproofed room in the middle of the factory floor, I saw a Fender guitar and a 2x12 speaker cabinet. Remember when I said that ISO 9001 dictates constant quality control? Well, a very lucky guitarist in Shenzhen has the job of grabbing random Vox heads and combos off the assembly line and taking them into that room to play until he's convinced they meet spec.
He gets paid for it, too.
In the blue distance, the vertical offices bear their names
I guess you could say that IAG was ultimately successful in its dastardly plan to convince me that it's concerned about quality. I suppose the company could have been staging a huge charade for the benefit of me and my traveling companion, Home Theater's Mark Fleischmann. But it seems like a stretch.
Of course, IAG is taking advantage of China's vast pool of affordable labor. I'm sure that, like all companies that manufacture in the People's Republic, it's also taking advantage of a more relaxed regulatory structure. But none of that changes the fact that the IAG facility is one of the most sophisticated and quality-conscious I've seen anywhere—including some of the most forward-thinking high-end factories on the planet.
More than that, there was an energy present at IAG that made its success seem inevitable. The labor force on the factory floor ranged from the extremely unskilled to the cream of China's technical and engineering schools, but one thing remained constant: These people take pride in what they do. There was a language barrier, of course, so I don't know whether that pride was in moving China forward or in the products they were making, but I do know pride and determination when I see it. Boy, did I witness it in Shenzhen.
I'm going to start learning Chinese. It's going to come in handy if I intend to continue writing about high-end audio.
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Post By：2008-9-25 17:14:40 [只看该作者]
