This is a question I am asked more often than almost any other by folks who don’t live in Western Australia.

Above all else, I suggest you try to find someone technically focused, able to provide evidence of their work, who solves problems and who has positive feedback, without the crazed rants a few of my competitors like to leave for people who aren’t happy with their services. You’ll never see me ranting at anyone, no matter what I think of the customer.

Try to:

• Find out who’s busy and recommended by other reliable sources, like good retailers.
• Look for the best technicians rather than the lowest rates, because you get what you pay for.
• Avoid sight-unseen quotes; nobody can know exactly what your equipment needs without seeing it.
• Look at reviews, read the good and bad ones, and the responses to them.
• Avoid recappers; recapping rarely fixes things, and problem-solving is key.
• Remember, there are no miracles, only skilled people doing great work; everything else is hot air.

Ask Retailers

One 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 can rely on and who do good work. Experienced staff will be able to recommend someone who can assist you or perhaps even arrange the repair through their store. Shonky retailers use shonky repairers.

Keep in mind that retailers add a charge for dealing with and arranging such work. This is quite reasonable, given that it takes a real person time to book in and arrange a repair job, and this will be an addition to the raw repair cost charged by the technician.

Other Considerations

Good technicians 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.