I’d be happy to provide an estimate once we’ve determined precisely what’s gone wrong and why.

Speculation

Electronic equipment failures are typically ‘black box’ scenarios, meaning there are no obvious visual clues to help determine what has gone wrong. Contrary to what many imagine, there are usually no obvious ‘red flags’ and “bulging capacitors” are a largely forum-created nonsense in hi-fi gear, almost a meme at this point. Blown components often show absolutely ZERO external signs of having failed.

Moving from an unknown failure mode to remediation is how a competent technician earns his money. Technical testing requires the use of test and measurement equipment and deep experience. The more complex the equipment, the more potential unknowns and the more challenging the resolution.

There is little room for guesswork, the solution is to test, measure, and get to the root of the problem/s. This concept applies to all things, be they amplifiers, cars, motorcycles or people; in fact, it applies to almost all technical repair work and all fields, so it’s an important one to understand.

Assessment

The first step for any professional involves inspection and assessment. Asking a technician for a quote before they have looked at a piece of equipment is pointless. That’s asking for a guess as to what’s wrong, what parts will be needed and how long the repair will take when the person doing the work has none of the necessary information.

Professionals who solve problems for a living don’t approach them like that. It’s like asking a mechanic for a quote over the phone to fix a car with unknown problems that they haven’t even seen. It’s effectively pointless, but more importantly, significantly underestimates the complexity of jobs like this one:

Six Steps

The correct approach involves a logic-based and stepwise appraisal and assessment of the equipment and its faults. There are six steps to electrical fault finding and repair:

1. Collection of evidence
2. Analysis of the evidence
3. Location of the fault
4. Determination and removal of the cause
5. Rectification of the fault
6. Checking, adjustment and calibration

Steps 1 to 3 comprise the assessment phase and generally have to be completed before a cost estimate can be offered. All the steps require a technician to be hands-on with the equipment. Other issues may become evident once work has commenced, which is why reputable repairers typically provide cost estimates, and generally only after this critical assessment phase.

Pretenders

So, why would anyone pretend to know what’s wrong and how much a repair will cost without first inspecting and testing the equipment in question? Simple: they want or need the business and they’re prepared to guess and potentially mislead people to secure it.

Some folks expect sight-unseen quotes and less ethical repairers enable this expectation because it gets them work. I don’t need the work and will never enable those who expect blind quotes. I will always educate people as to why this approach is unhelpful.

I could never have guessed what was wrong with a Krell KSA-100S I repaired a couple of years ago for example. I fixed multiple issues only to discover one hidden issue at the very end. It’s an interesting read! Similarly, an Accuphase E-303 I repaired contained five unrelated faults, none of which could have been guessed because they were so unusual.

When you have a repairable amplifier, the last thing you want is to end up with a ruined one. Take this beautiful Gryphon DM-100 class-A amplifier for example. Sadly, this lovely amplifier visited all the wrong people before I finally saw it and by then it was unfortunately too late.

More…

Information regarding general service and repair costs can be found in this FAQ. Find out more with these repair-related FAQs:

• Liquid Audio’s charging structure
• Why equipment inspection is so important
• Why some equipment shouldn’t be repaired
• Why we are often fully booked