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Our Policy

• We will operate differently than other dealers.
  Unlike traditional dealers:

• We will have knowledgeable partners who are passionate about great sound.
  
• We will only sell products that we believe to be "Best of Class".
  
• We will not sell competing products within a "class".
  
• We will not have to make a sale to pay for rent or payroll.
  
• We will only recommend solutions that we believe are right for you and that you will enjoy.
  
• Our showrooms are designed for listening in a realistic setting.
  
• We will operate by appointment only.
  
• During your appointment, the showroom will be reserved only for you and the people you chose, with no interruptions.
  
• If required, your purchases can be delivered and set up or shipped directly to you.
  
• After purchase, we provide a 30 day trial period on new equipment, during which time the product can be returned for full refund if it does not meet your expectations - provided that you have treated the product with respect while it was in your custody. We also provide a 3 Month Upgrade Program during which time the product may be exchanged with another component for full value of the purchased price.

How We Conduct Business

• We will never lie to you. We will also try to tell you the whole truth, as we know it. We will not pretend that we know something when we don't.
  
• We will not sell you something if we do not believe it will bring you joy and fulfill your needs and expectations. We will recommend a competitor's product if we feel that it will serve you better. You can feel comfortable using us as a resource.
  
• We are not shy about expressing our opinions. We believe our opinions to be valid and feel passionately about them. Yet, we accept the possibility that they are refutable and welcome sincere efforts to advance our understanding of how to optimize the joy of listening to sound reproduction.
  
• In the end, you must be the judge. We want you to have the opportunity (a trial period) to see if our technical and aesthetic judgments fulfill your requirements and expectations. So we provide a 30-day money back guarantee on all new equipment. (Not applicable to previously owned equipment or clearout specials) All we ask, for providing this opportunity, is that you pay for the merchandise and if applicable, the shipping costs of the equipment to your location and treat the equipment with respect. If you decide to return the equipment within the 30 day trial period, we will refund your money once it is inspected and will pay for shipping the equipment back to us.
  
• Many performance issues can be dealt with on the phone. When they cannot, our partners stand behind the products with some of the best warranties in the business.
  
• We believe you have the right to prompt and courteous customer service. The reality is that the right person(s) to answer your questions many not always be available when you call, but we promise to be conscientious about returning your calls and getting the right answers to your questions. You deserve to know what is going on and we will make a sincere effort to keep you informed.
  
• We do not believe that the customer is always right. How could this be so? But we believe that you have the right to be treated with respect - the same for us - and you have the right to be satisfied.
  
• We have chosen not to sell competing components. We have instead made judgments about what we believe are the "best of class" components, which in turn defines "best of class" systems. In this way, we can describe our mission as providing elegant systems for music lovers (best of class systems), using best of class components.

MKOM Discounting Policy

We receive frequent requests to offer discounts on our products. Some people have a general perception that discounting is a good thing - It is seen by some dealers as a necessity and buyers think they’ve got a good deal. To clarify the controversial issues surrounding discounting we have set down the pros and cons as follows. Hopefully this will provide an honest look at an area that is often misunderstood as everyone has a tendency to want a “bargain” along with high quality and value for money.

ARGUMENTS FOR DISCOUNTING

From a Client’s point of view:
• It introduces competitive pricing that drives prices down providing better value for money
• If a large order is placed then it deserves a discount and incentive
• Customer loyalty deserves to be rewarded with discounts

From a Dealer’s point of view:
• Other dealers do it, so everyone must follow suit or lose business
• For those with low overheads such as mail order, the customer expects a discount and certain stores can afford to do it – particularly chains with large buying power or mail order operators

From a Manufacturer’s point of view:
• If other products are discounted then they are obviously better value so everyone should follow suit or lose out on orders and dealers who want to discount

ARGUMENTS AGAINST DISCOUNTING

Having spent a good number of years in the industry it is interesting to look back at a little of the history of hi-fi discounting (which has always been around). When Linn introduced the idea of single speaker demo rooms with proper equipment comparisons, most of the magazines wrote almost monthly comments about the costs of high quality service and the dangers of discounting for both customers and the industry in general. Linn, Rega, Naim and other reputable companies were applauded for their stance on not allowing dealers to discount their products – a stance which remains the same to this day. It is worth re-iterating the arguments that are put forward for a no discounting policy – these might be listed as follows:

From a Client’s point of view:
• The value for money is usually actually better on non-discounted products – the reason is that discounted products are often vastly overpriced and underperforming in the first place. Discounting creates the illusion of a bargain but is often no more than a gimmick.
• The other thing to bear in mind is that some manufacturers offer their products with higher margins to increase a shop’s profit margin. This is an obvious incentive for the shop to favor these goods and has the effect of giving a shop the room to maneuver in terms of offering a “discount”. The drawback is that it also gives it a bias towards certain products that is not based on value for money or performance. Because the manufacturer is offering greater margins to the shop, the customer is usually the end loser because the product needs manufacturing and design cost cuts to maintain the better margin for the dealer.
• Dealers provide an important service. If a dealer doesn’t discount – they can afford to stock equipment and take the time and trouble to put on proper demonstrations – this aspect of hi-fi is different to much of the retail trade of other goods as it can be extremely time consuming. However buyers often need the opportunity to compare equipment by auditioning it. This situation is further exacerbated because of the need to educate people in listening and further complicated by the fact that the right choice of equipment can depend on room acoustics, a persons hearing / taste in music and the equipment they already have.
• The better shops may close - If discounting is allowed the service oriented shops lose out to “box shifters” and may close.
• It means people don’t have to rely on reviews – in the area of sound reproduction, magazine reviews are helpful but are by no means always reliable. All reputable reviewers will recommend you listen to equipment for yourself – Why?

1. Everyone’s hearing is different to varying degrees – Some people have hearing loss in the higher frequencies (including dealers & reviewers who are often untested). Hearing loss is not a function of old age so much as exposure to loud sound levels – machinery, discos etc. This hearing loss can occur at a young age leads to a different perception of how equipment sounds as it can be the equivalent of stuffing cotton wool in your ears for treble sounds.
2. Rooms vary considerably – larger or “dead” rooms tend to favor bright equipment.
3. Equipment varies in tonal balance and sometimes requires careful matching with other equipment.

From a Dealer’s point of view:
• It is a fairer system - It costs money and takes time for a shop to provide demonstration facilities. Shops that invest in high quality service cannot discount in the same way that a mail order company with few overheads can. The reasons are obvious customers like to see and hear a product so they go to a shop for a demonstration and then are likely to order from low overhead dealer or Mail Order Company if the products they like are being offered at great discounts. This practice is understandable on the part of the buyer but is unfair on the dealer who has done all the hard work in providing the demonstration.
• It takes a long term view - Dealers that discount, do so to secure sales by gaining a short term advantage over other dealers or drive them out of business. Although this sometimes works it is in our view a short sighted policy and damaging to the industry -

1. Firstly it is the service oriented dealers who suffer.
2. When a dealer discounts, it obliges everyone else to follow suit - there is then no competitive edge for the first shop who decided to discount – the next step is that this first shop may decide to offer an even bigger discount - so then everyone else has to follow suit and viability sinks lower and lower – you can see where this is leading – everyone loses out, including the customer at the end of the day – one simply cannot have service for nothing.

From a Manufacturer’s point of view:
• In the end, the better dealers prefer to do business with companies that do not allow discounting – the reasons have already been outlined.
• It enables an accurate perception of value for money. If a product is worthwhile and competitive it is easy to demonstrate it to be so without resorting to discounting. An uncompetitive product needs to be discounted to create an illusion of value for money however the question to ask is always “is there a non-discounted product better at this price?” For example you may hear of $500 off a $2000 Tone Arm. This sounds like an amazing bargain until you actually audition it against an arm costing only $600 with no discount which sounds far better. The $600 arm is superbly priced in the first place and offers far better value than the heavily discounted item. However some people will still ask for discount on the $600 item under a misguided impression that it must be overpriced because some other product offered a massive discount. The point is that most high value for money items have already been “discounted” and simply cannot come lower without sacrificing long term viability. It takes a phenomenal level of time and research to launch leading edge products and this investment deserves to be recouped – leading edge design is not usually reflected in discounted prices – obsolete, uncompetitive, poor value, end of line products are characterized by discounts. Some manufacturers actually feel it is a slight on their character to be asked for a discount and the reasons for this are not usually understood – it is often perceived as being rigid, uncompromising, arrogant, mean spirited etc. Hopefully the above points will go some way to providing an explanation that there are strong ethical reasons for not discounting and that discounted products are frequently just an illusionary saving.

Exceptions
End of line products – There are cases when discounting should be encouraged in our view – when a product is being superseded or phased out there is a changeover period. Once the replacement product is out on the shelves then it is only fair to discount the end of line product or there will be large losses incurred which benefits no-body in the long run.
Slightly damaged / marked goods or ex demo products are other obvious examples.



Return on Investment (ROI)
There are a few people who complain about price and the value of high end products. This brief article is an attempt to explain why the product lines that we represent are valued the way that they are.
We owe it to people to explain a little further why you get value for money when purchasing from MKOM - After all you may get far better perceived value for money by purchasing a mass produced item manufactured in China, India etc.
The key difference is leading edge design in the product line that we have assembled - this usually takes close on a lifetime of experience to produce - otherwise the Radio Shacks of this world would have the market sewn up - Why not just upgrade the components on a standard regulator and expect great results?
Secondly - to value an item by the value of its components is a desperately devaluing argument - When you buy Microsoft Office software for $500, the CD material cost is less than $1 - Is this smart business practice? - People appreciate that you pay for enormous design time and a leading product. To continue the analogy further, consider buying a computer. Which looks the better perceived value - a laptop or an equivalent massive computer of yesteryear that would have taken whole living rooms to accommodate? - At the end of the day it's all about design.
If one questions the cost of a power supply design, how does anyone justify the cost of a black gate capacitor or other high end components? There are certain hidden processes that have been carried out on these capacitors but to all intensive purposes they look identical to other capacitors.
Before I got involved with Hi Fi I could never understand the cost of hi end audio - that was until I got into the field myself. By way of explanation the following may help.
Even if a product costs nothing to produce you've still got the following problems:1. To outperform all the competition - some of whom have multi-million dollar development budgets - design time is extremely costly and most people think a hobbyist has the time to come up with a market leading product - they don't, unless utterly fanatical and even then most never see the light of day!1a. Even if you come up with a product that is head and shoulders above the competition it's not easy to publicize it with a saturated market in the face of competitors with well established reputations, dealer networks and large advertising budgets.
Most people think they understand how time consuming and costly all this is - but they probably don't, which is why only 1 in 10 companies survive longer than 5 years.