Quote Originally Posted by Nick View Post
Anthony, I think that is part of the problem for sure but not the whole enchilada. I am certainly one of the people with backbone enough to make my own decisions but at times this can be difficult. Sometimes the manufacturers and/or distributors manage to shoot themselves firmly in the foot. A recent personal experience when I was looking to change speakers brought this home to me. I will not mention the names for fear of retribution but a little lateral thinking based on what I did end up buying will probably get you the answer.

I wanted to listen to a pair of speakers by maker X. I contacted the distributor only to be told that he only currently had a much smaller model in the country. So I said that I would certainly like to hear that but was really looking further up the range than that. He then said he would arrange for the manufacturer to send a pair of the more upmarket speakers for my evaluation. Two weeks passed with no word, bear in mind the manufacturer is European based, so I again contacted the distributor and basically I got an "I really can't be bothered response". This infuriated me a little and so I grabbed the bull by the horns and directly contacted the manufacturer. I told them what I was trying to do and the difficulties I'd encountered. Their response was even more amazing, along the lines of we don't do enough business in the UK to bother. Needless to say at this point I decided to not pursue the quest any further.

Two different strands of apathy here.

One a distributor who didn't want to put himself out on a maybe purchaser, this I can almost understand as from what I understand most demo models have to be paid for by the distributor.

The manufacturer response just baffled me. They have distribution here that you would have thought indicated a desire to build their market over here. At the time they had an interested customer with £10K burning a hole in his pocket they just shuffled off shrugging their shoulders.

Just my .02

Nick
nick,
thats terible! just goes to show that nothing is clear cut, and that on times manufacturers can also be just as bad [worse in your case] than their distributors...