Nearly all electronic components are are manufactured in the orient now. Companies may have their headquarters or warehouses in other countries, but they don't actually build allot of stuff from scratch.
A company like Shure likely does what all the rest do. They have some high end products they still assemble in the US but the actual parts come from the lowest bidder that meet their engineering needs. Their budget lines are all farmed out to the third world manufacturers. They try to keep their manufacturing origins secret but its old news to anyone who works in the business.
This is the same with all the big electronic companies and has been for many decades now. I've been in the industry working for major manufacturers since the late 70's and its all the same. There's still assembly lines where they have unskilled workers earning minimum wage sticking parts in boards. These companies usually make unique custom stuff. The numbers of units needed aren't huge, so its not cost effective to retool an entire factory in the orient. They just import the components and setup a manual assembly line to fill the orders needed.
There are also companies that make boutique stuff and charge an arm and a leg for it due to assembly costs, but there many parts made locally. Non electronic parts like a chassis may be cheaper to bend and drill. Metal weighs allot and shipping costs is expensive. In the case of tubes, you still have some other factories in Russia.
There are some parts made in the US. Precision Resistor for example still makes their resistors by hand to meet super low specifications. Allot of your aerospace, military and government stuff is manufactured locally. It prevents the designs from being pirated. Even then, you have things like Copy Machines, Faxes and other G4 communications gear manufactured in the orient. I know because I helped write the service manuals for on allot of the gear in the 90's. You find G4 gear in nearly all government locations including Air Force one. You had to have top security clearance to work with that gear and even then some of the technology was off limits. The gear had mystery boards sealed in epoxy and all you knew is it passed encrypted data.
The gear that connects the stuff to communicate, as I said is another story. Digital encryption often requires special circuit designs. You wont find allot of those kinds of chips being made in china, even though those countries built their own military off pirated technology.
They can manufacturer the exact same quality components in the orient as they do any place else. We rebuilt the factories in Japan after WWII with the latest technology and put them to work building commercial products other countries would buy because they were inexpensive. They started off with gear like cheap radios that barely worked and would break in a few days, but the public bought them.
Over the decades, they learned to focus on quality control and improved their products. Once that went up, they could score contracts for major companies and marketed branded products for those manufacturers.
Shure is only one of thousands who has adopted this practice. They couldn't survive financially otherwise. An SM57 made in the US today would probably cost $300 to make here today with the labor costs and EPA restrictions, yet Shure still sells the same product at the same price it did 30 years ago.
China has only begun to get into the higher end electronics stuff in say the past 10~20 years or so. Japan used to do all that manufacturing, but their labor costs have gone up as the wealth of that country increased. Japan first subcontracted component manufacturing to China factories. They would buy land in China, build a factory, and hire and train the local labor force,and manage the entire factory to build parts. They did the same thing to China that we did to Japan decades ago. At first it was just the individual components, now its the entire assembly of finished gear.
The Buyers in the market in the end are the ones who drive quality control. If the gear works well for the expected lifespan, then the manufacturing is successful and they make a profit. If there's flaws, it can wipe a manufacturer out. Remember what the sticky gas pedal thing did for Toyota. There wasn't even a problem, just rumor, but it rocked that companies grip on the auto market and they still haven't fully recoverd.
The way of things in electronics now, its a world market. You can make believe it isn't so, but its only a sign of ignorance if you do. The world is a factory to make things people "think" they need to make themselves feel important. The rich buy from the poor and the poor are motivated by what the rich have. Its a circle that's been around forever because its based on mans primitive emotions. Greed and envy.
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