yes, these are ubiquitous.
Some of them sound pretty good. I once had an "Ikhwan Khalifeh" one from the late 60s that was okay, but not great. I ended up selling it. They
are hit and miss, with the ones from the 1990s being mostly pretty bad. Like any factory oud, sometimes you get a good instrument by accident,
though! The pegs were uniformly disastrous but often if you find one the pegs have been replaced with something usable. I suspect the bad pegs on
these probably contributed to a lot of aspiring oudists giving up
It's heartening to see the new generation of this family of luthiers working to bring back a higher level of quality.
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