I have just been reading a post on a forum which I thought I should mention here. I have a number of reasons for this.
The first is that the behaviour of the manufacturer is shocking. The second is that the name he uses to trade under is Source Odyssey, and I wouldn't want anyone to think he was connected with me. The third is that it is an illustration of how things can go wrong with long distance transactions when one party has no intention of fulfilling their side of the bargain, and the other party has taken no measures to ensure the safe completion of the transaction.
The company in question is Drews Audio, run by Ingmar Drews. He was connected with Mike Moore and Source-Odyssey, as a distributor in Germany, over twenty years ago. I never had dealings with him, and he wasn't my distributor with Odyssey Engineering.
When S-O folded, I presume he started a business selling, then making, record cleaning machines, based on the Keith Monks design. He used the name Source-Odyssey in marketing it, for some reason. His name has come up because of a thread HERE, at
http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/vt.mpl?f=vinyl&m=982714
where someone in Australia has had problems with him.
The lessons here are: to know who you are dealing with, get references from others who have had similar dealings, use a payment method through which you can get recompense if there is a problem, don't blindly pay everything up front to a stranger. If you pay in full, in advance, there are ways of securing payments using banks until there is proof of shipping, which is a more business-like arrangement for large amounts. A deposit is fair if there are costs incurred to fulfil your specific order. It would normally be lost should you cancel. And of course you can now check out the forums for reports of dodgy dealings.
It works the other way too. I would only send stuff prior to payment to someone I was sure of. In the early days of Odyssey, most shops paid their invoices. But there were a couple who didn't, and I never got my money. One was Super-fi in Nottingham. If I remember the others, I'll mention them too. Of course, I never then did any further business with them.
