"Fake" Oktavas are not really fakes at all!!!

[Lucas Adamson]

I just bought a Tula made Oktava from eBay. OK, big deal. Anyway, I phoned up the guy I bought it off, as it came with a second hand clip despite being listed as New Old Stock, and the guy i bought it off turns out to be Alan McKay, a very posh sounding Englishman. Anyway, he apologises and says he'll send me a whole new MK012 as compensation!!! Why - well he is Alan McKay (A.S.M) yes the guy whose initials were on these mics for several years, including the so called Chinese fakes.

He told me this story about how when he first went to Tula, the company was a mess, nobody had ever heard of Oktava outside of Russia at all - they had zero exports, their quality control was awful, but they had good capsules. He bought 24 mics, and then later went back and bought the entire stock of the whole company! His son developed much of the modern quality control and component updates, and he bought, or else owned the International side of the company. He says he put £10million into the company, and it was him who moved production to China, which he claims made a better quality version of the product, better manufactured to a higher standard. So this was the guy who commissioned the so called fakes! Anyway, he claims that Oktava are partly military owned, and basically ripped him off for several million pounds and started publishing that the Chinese mics were fakes, which despite his protestations, they refused to retract, as they made no money from them. He says that they were not fakes at all, but fully licensed by him, as the intellectual property owner of the design, with full rights to use the Oktava name. The story was more complex than that, but that's the gist of it. Bizarre!

I'll bet there's another side to this story, but it was an insight into how you can be told a thing through a media and take it as read only to find that the back-story is much more complex.

Lucas

 

[ullanta]

Ummm... that's pretty much the story... "real" Oktava mics have always been made in Russia; this brit tried to start up competing manufacture in China. You don't mention that when McKay started making mics in China, Oktava continued making the original mics in Russia. By this time, the Russian Oktavas were already well-established and respected in audio circles.

As far as I understand, McKay's role was always pretty much as a distributor (who may have pushed for quality improvements), and while he may have had rights to MARKET Oktava mics internationally, he never had the right to manufacture them.

 

[Lucas Adamson]

Well, that's not what he says. He claims that he had all of the paperwork in place, but was stung, and feared for his life in challenging Oktava through the Russian legal system. Of course, he claims to have primary evidence of this (rights documents), but nobody else has seen it so they will make of it what they will.

Anyway, it is interesting to note that the word "fake" is not necessarily the right word for what they are - it suggests that some Chinese bootlegger has made some poor quality rip-off like a fake Gucci handbag or whatever.

 

[ullanta]

There have been a lot of "microphone wars" lately - look up the Blue/Violet battles if you're bored! Never simple, it seems...

 

[Petrus]

This whole "genuine" versus "fake" is quite interesting and complex thing. Did you know that some of the "fake" handbags and many "fake" chinese clothes are actually genuine, they come from the same factory as the "real" ones, just the distribution chain is different (and there is not necesarilly any theft involved either). There is a legistlation in Europe which states that only the owner of the brand name can import that brand; if somebody else imports exactly the same stuff, even if aquired legally abroad, into EU it is considered "fake" and confiscated!

So it is not the origin/quality/genuines of the handbag, jacket or microphone which determines if it is fake or not, but who controlls the distribution and sales chain (and sets the prices). A fleece jacket costs about 3 USD to make, it can sell for 8 bucks in Kathmandu, 20 bucks in a thrift store, 100 bucks in an outdoor shop or 400 bucks in a fashion store on Manhattan, but they all come out as a 3 dollar piece from the same sweatshop in China.

Rode mics are made in China, but as most of the price comes from the marketing etc expences and brand markup, they can be legally branded "made in Australia", as this means they are more than 50% Australian....

Recepie for a microphone company: Buy good, cheap capsules from china. Have a nice body designed for it, some "handcraft" details are nice, strange colors are "in". Use gold/platinum/iridium/stainless steel. Make up a good story/history for the company. Make convincing net pages, not too flashy. Make an underground campaign using aliases on internet boards like this one. Have limited supplies. Set prices high.

 

[ullanta]

Yes, exactly, it's hard to know these days. Manufacturers will tell you that some of the "fakes", even made in the same factory, are QC rejects, etc. Who knows? Certainly with microphones now, there are many clones of the same thing with different branding, sometimes with changes in details. This is again not necesarily bad; companies like Peluso and Cascade seem to be able to offer some pretty good mics at good prices by "hand finishing" chinese clone-mics.

But I do think the Oktava issue is different... since there is indeed a historical production line that's still running, and a competitor that started making clone mics only very recently. I'm not making any claims about which are better - but Oktava has a long history in Russia, and doesn't (outside of McKay's claims) manufacture in China.

 

[Noiz2]

The guy who does the Oktava mods (lower noise etc.) noticed some very distinct differences in tone and QA. The Oktava's have traditionally had an issue with QA also (why you should buy from The Sound Room (they do their own QA)) so that isn't such a big deal. The gist of his analysis was that the chinese version wasn't bad so much as different and that it wasn't as Schoeps like.

The whole name "licensing" thing always sounded like a scam. The design goes back to Schoeps and the Russian occupation of eastern Germany after WWII.