This is an excellent question and one I am asked more often than almost any other.

Try to find someone technically focused, able to provide evidence of their work and who solves problems rather than re-caps everything and who has overwhelmingly positive feedback.

• Find out who’s busy and recommended by other reliable sources like premium retailers
• Look for the best technicians rather than the lowest rates
• Avoid those offering sight-unseen quotes; blind quotes are silly, and you don’t want a silly technician
• Look at reviews and read the bad ones and responses to them
• Avoid recappers; recapping rarely fixes anything; problem-solving is the key
• Remember: there are no miracles, only skilled people doing good work

Ask Retailers

One particularly useful piece of advice is to find the best hi-fi store/s in the largest city near you. Ask someone experienced there who they use to service and repair the type of equipment you own.

Good retailers use technicians they know they can rely on. Experienced staff will be able to recommend someone who can assist you or perhaps even arrange the repair through their store.

Keep in mind that retailers usually add on a charge for dealing with and arranging such work, and this will be additional to the raw repair cost charged by the technician.

Other Considerations

Good technicians will inspire confidence and won’t try to quote you on a job without inspecting and testing the equipment. It may be tempting to go with a ‘magic blind quote,’ but ask yourself how a technician knows what’s wrong with your equipment or what condition it’s in before parting with your money.

Recapping is a fad that is often unhelpful in solving problems. Many or even most faults are not capacitor-related. Replacing lots of old parts might sound like a good idea, and it can be, but this is best done after figuring out what is wrong with a piece of equipment, for hopefully obvious reasons.

Tracing and resolving electronic faults is hard. Look for someone who understands this and expresses it, and who is interested in finding the cause of a problem and resolving it.