Quote Originally Posted by doodoos View Post
Stereophile covers the Magico v3 speaker in the latest issue and very fine they seem too. However there is no UK distributor, but there is in Finland, Greece etc.Looking through the pictures of tasty gear on show in Munich recently I became aware of how much never gets to these shores. Why not?
Presumably they consider our market unsustainable but why? Is the UK considered as irrelevant in some audio circles?
I’ve had a little experience of this a hopefully my comments might help a bit. Of course I’ve been a retailer for distributors, and had discussions from time to time with US and German makers about becoming an importer. Most recently, this was with regards to TacT. It came to nothing.

Intuitively, existing importer/distributors do a simple estimate in their minds. It’s salient and without hard data, only rough and ready. It goes along the lines of the ratio of ‘x’ to ’y’ where x is the number of audiophiles in the UK with the money to purchase the item and ‘y’ are the number of options available to that audio within the price band. This last bit is most important.

Given that the market (‘x’) is small in the UK plus the fact that we have some highly competent home grown products PLUS the fact we have a number of incumbent and established importers with good products, then the ‘ratio’ as described above is currently, and I guess for the foreseeable future, commercially unattractive.

My belief is that it is as simple as this. Of course there are other factors which are difficult to confront. For example, establishing a brand in the UK that has no previous reputation. It happens, but it’s increasingly tough.

And then of course there is the grey import factor. Take STAX for example. A UK buyer would have to be nuts, in my view, to purchase STAX earspeakers in the UK. they can be bought (without voltage issues) direct from Japan and the USA for very considerable savings even when VAT and import duty are factored in. (It's slightly more complicated with the STAX Energisers though.)

It’s certainly true that some makers probably do feel the UK is irrelevant. This is certainly true of makers who have been represented numerous time via ‘n’ importers and frankly, no longer want the hassle. And there are the occasional deeply arrogant ones who either (a) don’t want to pay for CE approval or (b) think that we are a backward nation – or both.

There more to this. But I don’t want to bore anyone and I'm off to Chutneys tonight – a damn fine Indian Veggie restaurant in Drummond Street, London. http://www.london-eating.co.uk/362.htm