Graham:
I just returned to the US after spending a little over 24 months
living in Sydney. Now, I didn't ever order any expensive electronics
from the US, but we did order quite a few other items (my wife,
especially) and never had any troubles with the process whatsoever. I
used my Westpac Mastercard and they never charged me any conversion or
transaction fees when purhcasing from overseas. And none of the US
vendors had any qualms whatsoever in charging my Mastercard, even
though it was linked to an Aussie bank account (money is money, I
guess...). On occasion the box would arrive on our doorstep with an
orange sticker applied by the Australian Customs service indicating
that they had opened and inspected the contents (maybe they though I
was running diamonds from South Africa or something) but nothing ever
went missing or was damaged.
Regards,
Caesar
(now living in Santa Fe and misssing my VBs, Tim Tams and driving on
the left)
--- In Graham Evans <> wrote:
>
> An update on my progress in the forest sculpture walk/audio tours
> project is at the bottom of the email, but first my usual barrage of
> questions...
>
> I have been doing a far bit of looking for Australian suppliers for all
> the audio gear I'm pricing at the moment. So my first question is -
are
> there any Australian gear suppliers that anyone on the list could
> recommend? I recently priced AT3032s at $400AUD each from an
Australian
> supplier. Rob D. tells me he can get them for $170US each. That is on
> pat with most of the prices I see over here. The exception is Rode
mics
> which seem cheap and plentiful here. I have a price of $585AUD on an
> NT4. Not sure the exact conversion of that to US$ but it is sure to be
> a lot more competitive than the AT3032s.
>
> My reason for trying to find suppliers in Australia is that buying from
> the US (or UK) involves lots of unknowns:
> How long will it take (I've had amazon books take months)?
> Will it arrive at all?
> Will the American site reject my credit card for no good reason as
usual?
> Will it arrive in working order?
> If it doesn't how long is this going to go on for?
>
> Then there is:
> lousy exchange rates and fees for charged for exchanging money
> often expensive postage
> the difficulty (to put it mildly) of after-sales service
>
> So I am wondering if anyone has regular good experiences of importing
> from America to Australia or somewhere equally distant and if so with
> which suppliers. I am thinking of getting som gear from Sound
> Professionals - for one example.
>
> Another thing: my understanding is that as long as the total
(Australian
> dollar) price of the order is less than $1,000 then no customs
applies.
> Anyone had charges or delays from customs?
>
> So enough of the third degree; Here's an update on my project to create
> audio tours in the forest along a sculpture walk:
>
> I have received my 3 sony minidisc recorders. The were an amazing
> bargain from www.minidisc.australia.au and I believe they are being
sent
> all over the world from Australia due to some peculiar local pricing
> decisions by Sony.
>
> I have managed to rig up an old Pentium II with Win98SE and
> SonicStage3.4 and then Network it to my Linux home setup (with samba). =
> None of that was very easy. But the best bit is that the Automated WAV
> converter on the SS3.4 importer now dumps the fresh WAVs straight onto
> my Linux desktop. Like loaves out of the oven...
>
> I will gladly help anyone trying to acheive such a setup but I'll have
> to admit I was flying blind. And it was a weekend's work.
>
> Rob D. has mentioned to me I will need a bit of RAM to handle 7Hour
> Hi-SP files. I have 288MB which sounds enough to me. But I'm guessing
> the 2GB and 8GB hard drives on the Win98 machine might cause me
> problems. On the other hand the wav files never touch the Windows
> machine (they go straight over the network to my linux workstation) so
> perhaps that will be okay too. Sonicstage 3.4 seems to really creak
> along with frequent long pauses for breath. But the actual importing
> and conversion goes quite smoothly.
>
> Graham E.
> btw the project I am working on is the Southern Forest Sculpture Walk,
> and is managed by a purpose formed group:
> Southern Forest Arts.
>
> There is very little to Google on any of those names yet but there will
> be. Eventually. We plan to open in November.
>
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