Re: Thread on HC asking about Blackouts' parts made in China
Thanks for pointing that one out. I will go respond over there. I'll update my response here when I'm done. Basically they're made here, but we're honest enough to tell you that the PCB and cover come from asia, because that's different from our passive pickups. The Blackouts are wound and "made" here, end of story.
EDIT: Okay here's what I wrote:
Nobody takes "Made in the USA" more seriously than Seymour Duncan. In fact, that's exactly WHY we print that on the box. We don't want to be ambiguous about anything.
The Blackouts PCB comes from China, and some, but not all covers come from Korea. The covers look pretty darn good. If they didn't, we'd source them here or somewhere else. We could just put "Made in USA" on the box, and if anyone challenged us based on the PCB, we would be able to validate the overall percentage required to use the phrase "Made in USA" and that would be the end of it. But its because we care about this stuff that we disclose.
The comments about the components and the potentiometers, etc. are dead on. Some of the highest quality small PCB work is in Asia, that's just the fact. If you get the right facility, the stuff will be good enough for brain surgery. Do you think so-and-so is only buying USA capacitors, resistors, and op amps? Uh, no. So after they get their Asian made components, they use robotic pick and place machines and then send them through a machine for automatic soldering. Not really an example of creating US jobs. But we perform 100% testing on each board before we build a pickup with it. Then, we perform 100% testing throughout the build process. Those are US jobs.
Taking what we choose to voluntarily print on our box vs. what anyone else prints on theirs is a dishonest comparison.