I have a pair of the fantastic Mackie HR824 MKI monitor speakers. They’re great, easily the best midprice monitor speaker on the market, in my opinion.
So naturally I was interested when the MKII was announced, especially since my MKIs are sitting thousands of kilometres away! And with the AUD pretty strong against the greenback, surely the price would be reasonable, right?
WRONG!
Price in America: USD$599 = AUD$625.23 each = AUD$1,350.46 for a pair.
Price in Australia: AUD$2,999 for a pair.
The speakers are identical save the localised power cable. Voltage is switchable on the back. The Australian price is 220% of the American for the exact same fucking thing.
Fuck you, Australian distributors. The only way I’d pay you more than double the proper market price for a pair of these is if it included a free kick right in your useless, greedy faces.
UPDATE: annoyingly, on the mk2 the voltage is NOT switchable on the back, locking us into the Euro or AU model. I don’t know any good EU online stores but the list price is EUR€599, about AUD$995 each. I wonder what they cost in China - where all this stuff is made.
Anyway, the price difference with the US model would easily cover a huge stepdown transformer.
It infuriates me that these power compatibility issues even exist! It all just gets turned into DC internally anyway. Why isn’t there a range of standard interchangeable transformer modules on all electronics? Then they could just make the same thing a million times, and slot the module in as required. Methinks the savings gained by doing that would be outweighed by the arbitrage-style profits lost by being able to segment the markets, DVD Region style.