If you haven't heard of Schiit, it's a fascinating story of a small company that builds high end and low end headphone amps/dacs, for much less money than competitors. In CA.
One of the two founders wrote an online book about it here:
There's the minor issue of them not actually testing their designs perform as expected, at least one amp damaging some people's headphones as a result, and them denying the issue existed: http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/07/banned-at-head-fi.html Though that's not really a problem with manufacturing in the US, it's more of a general audiophile industry problem.