Stump,
When one looks up "long skinny room" in the encyclopedia, it should be your room we all see! I'll answer this in stages, since you have brought forth some excellent points and I want to do them all justice.
"Postage" to Australia is steep, as we manufacture Tubes full of air. Light fluffy things pay top freight, since they fill cargo space quickly. There are a couple shipping strategies, though. A single pallet of (4) 16x4 Tubes can cost almost as much to ship as a small container with 50-100 Tubes, so sometimes it pays to think big. Combining with someone, especially someone that wants to ship amplifiers (small heavy dense) can work, both end up enjoying lower costs. And oddly enough, we have found that folks on the west side of the Pacific seem to get cheaper shipping rates than we can on the east side, even though the destinations are the same. More in the next post.
Michael Adams
michael@acousticsciences.com