Yes, there are, but not many.

As one of Australia’s most trusted and reasonable repairers, and a former science teacher who managed thousands of teenagers, we have very few issues with customers. But: 1) you cannot please everyone, no matter how well you run a business; 2) not everyone is reasonable, well-intentioned or even sane, and 3) the customer isn’t always right.

The Blacklist

To protect our businesses and sanity, Liquid Audio, in collaboration with other leading Western Australian technicians, manages a list of people who are banned from receiving assistance from any in the group. This is known as the black list.

For perspective, my database comprises several thousand customers. I’ve added about 10 people to the blacklist in a decade, one so far in 2025. This is only about one per year, an exceptionally low rate, and I thank the 99.99% of reasonable people I’m fortunate to interact with!

The Process

There is a subset of around 0.01% people who are so unreasonable and otherwise problematic that attempts to assist them must be avoided. We don’t argue or try to reason with people like this. Instead, we apply a simple, zero-tolerance policy:

Assistance is terminated, customer details are recorded and shared with business owners in the group, and that individual is permanently blacklisted from all participating businesses.

Irreversibly losing access to the most respected repair businesses in Western Australia is an extraordinarily bad outcome for folks who love hi-fi equipment. It banishes these people to the world of the Hall-of-Shamers, an unfortunate, though deserved result. The overriding message, though, is that nobody needs to put up with rudeness or poor behaviour, and there are consequences for it.

Admission

Blacklisting generally comes about via obnoxious, entitled or otherwise unreasonable behaviour, usually fueled by an inability to correctly process reality. Classics include:

• ‘I don’t have to pay you for working on my equipment’, and the related ‘You need to work for free, but I don’t’
• ‘I don’t like your hours, you need to open when it suits me’
• ‘You stole my capacitors and are running a scam’
• ‘I’m blaming you for everything wrong with my trashed, WD-40-soaked amplifier,’ and the latest
• ‘I’m going to threaten and extort you even though you went out of your way to help me’

We don’t work with anyone like this more than once.