Posts Tagged ‘mackie’

Letter to Mackie

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

Mackie, I love you but why are your prices in Australia so unbelievably high?

Check this out. I’d love to pick up a pair of your new MR5s for my home setup (I already have some HR824s, and they’re awesome). So I look at the prices.

USD $150 each at sweetwater
AUD $400 each at online stores here

A current currency conversion: 150 U.S. dollars = 163.51 Australian dollars.

Don’t bother pulling out your calculators, that’s a 245% increase AFTER currency conversion. Someone is making a killing here, and it’s your brand that looks like an absolute rip-off. And don’t say it’s shipping, they’re made in China and Australia is *closer*.

I know the Australian distribution is probably not really your #1 concern but please can someone at least take a look at it? These guys are making off like bandits. I don’t mind paying a little more since we’re a smallish market, but how could anyone pay that much more? Two and a half times as much is insane. If you wonder why you don’t have any customers here, now you know - your local distribution partners are ripping you off blind, and as for the customers - we all know how to find US prices, and we all know the AUD is practically equal to the USD.

Would *you* pay a 245% premium, no matter how much you like Mackie?

Well, anyway, thanks and I just wanted to get this off my chest. Great work on all the products as usual, I love them. Just please fix the pricing situation in Australia : (

thanks a lot!

Sho

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Fuck You, Australian Distributors

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

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 , 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.

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