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With Italy's Pacetech in charge of EU distribution and support for Melody's new export models, one should expect much better customer service plus fluent communications in English now than were in place previously. But they obviously can't stop the transshipping web operators who sell heavily discounted gear direct through Singapore or Hong Kong. Squashing those outfits is virtually impossible.


With them it's a very blunt caveat emptor! Only complete tossers expect formally appointed dealers who sell authorized goods to then service and repair grey-market variants of dubious provenance. If you circumvent formal channels to acquire Aodixun by Melody product for example, you're on your own. With Pacetech-appointed dealers, there's a 3-year warranty.

It's a back-handed credit to the desirability of Melody products that back-door operators continue their shady practices.

A credit of the proper kind is that the privately owned/operated Melody plant produces Mystère as the pentode sister brand to the triode/ultralinear PrimaLuna products. Both are owned and sold by the Dutch Durob Audio company who also run the Ah! Tjoeb brand. PrimaLuna kit is built by the government-owned Cayin/Spark conglomerate. The 'dripping wet' black lacquer of Mystère gear and its styling give away its Melody origins.
Clearly Allen S. H. Wang keeps himself busy. He founded Melody in Australia because he had a shop in the Melbourne suburb of Bayswater. He later relocated to China for more cost-effective manufacturing. Word from Nadia is that he might move back to Oz in the near future. Despite having been in business for a good decade with numerous very favourable reviews in the Western press, for many there remains an attached stigma to being designed and built in the PRC.

Of course over the past 5 years, we've seen Chinese hifi come a very long way. Today brands like AURALiC play at the very top of their chosen price sector. Melody have always been about valve gear. It's likely that in the public eye they got inadvertently mixed up with the glut of affordable tube kit which exploded out of China about 10 years ago. Unlike Melody, much of it was poorly made and unreliable. Many dealers who sampled it early soon soured on what became known as ChiFi. They moved on. Because Melody products enjoy a very good reputation, they always were and remain targets for unscrupulous grey marketers. That their activities undermine and potentially fracture solid dealer networks is obvious.
What further confuses this issue are things like Dagogo's May 2014 review opening with a photo of the Aodixun P2688 preamp. The actual review unit was supplied by US importer Angel City Audio and lists at $6'999. Meanwhile the website of Pacetech shows the same unit as a Melody Platinum 101D for €14'000. That's more than double if you factor currency conversion rates. If our Italians have acted as Melody's global agents since 2011, what does this say? On Angel City Audio's website, we find a Melody PM845 model listed at $8'499. That looks identical to what the Pacetech site calls the Dark Power 845-2 monos at €10'800/pr. The American site also features numerous photos of Aodixun variants. Does this imply three different products tiers of domestic Chinese, European export and US export? If so, what distinguishes them apart from possible minor cosmetic changes and price?


If the Pro 88 is a pure export model as we're told, what was it doing on the cover of issue #379 of Audiotechnique? Why did Melody supply that loaner? Surely Chinese expats living abroad have little to no access to a Sino print magazine to warrant promotion of an exclusive export product in its pages. No matter what, spending just 15 minutes of Googling on the subject of Melody is bound to confuse.


Here one might justifiably conjecture that Mr. Wang's decision to establish Melody in mainland China has undermined his international efforts. Had he worked with Australia's higher cost of doing business and stayed out of China altogether, Melody today might be the Rogue Audio or even Audio Research of the East. If that is not how people think of them, my prior exposure to Melody gear suggests that this isn't due to the product itself. As reviewers we simply can't sort out surrounding issues. We can merely do a certain amount of due diligence, then report on the product at hand.