Uber expensive repair at United Radio

snratio

Ya probably could have hired the engineers who designed it to fix it for 1/2 that rate. Hourly rate to me was quite high. Low overhead business.

You do not know what you are talking about. Proper electronics repair requires a suite of test equipment and personnel capable of using it. Neither come cheap. Then there’s rent, insurance and all the costs associated with running a real business that has earned its reputation over a period of decades. So it’s a very different overhead requirement than you starting up as an Amway rep.

Minorl and abg2018, thank you for some good insight and personal experience.  I think you have added to my understanding of what goes into a service request.  Given how little the owner of the gear can actually know about the actual cost of the repair, it is easy to suspect that one has been taken advantage of by the shop.  It helps to know that that might not be the case.

@minorl 
I fully understand what you are saying. However, an experienced technician should easily find its way through the amp troubleshooting process and identify the faulty component(s). After a few years of experience, my technicians knew exactly or had a pretty good idea of the cause of any malfunction, on any specific manufacturer’s equipment.
When I had my repair shop, my most experienced technicians were working on the more complex gear. They never spent more than a work day to fix sophisticated telecommunications equipment. The rookie technicians were working on the less complex gear.

In a situation where the tech is having difficulties troubleshooting the gear, they could always ask a senior tech to help them out. Worse comes to worse, we contacted the manufacturer’s engineering department to get additional support.

United Radio is the exclusive Classé Audio service center for NA. They have access to the amp’s schematics and Classé Audio’s engineering department which is still located in Montreal, Canada. 

@abg2018
This was the first time I encountered an audio gear failure in 40 years into this hobby. I also filled you the UR forms and shipped the amp in. I received no e-mail or calls of any sort regarding my repair. I had to do all of the follow-ups myself via e-mail with Classé Audio CS, which was the intermediary between me and United Radio’s service department. The Classé Audio rep was very responsive and nice to work with.

United Radio via Classé’s CS provided me with a repair date which they missed by a few days. United Radio also made a mistake when shipping back the amp to Canada. They used a shipping company which does not provide customs brokerage services for Canadian customs clearance and over and above this, they indicated on the shipping documents that Livingston was my customs broker agent, which is false. Don’t have and never had any account with Livingston...

Dang, UPS, Purolator, DHL and Fedex all have a brokerage service, why not ship with one of these carrier? So my amp got stuck a few days at the Canadian Customs before somebody from the shipping company asked me the name of my customs broker.

United Radio should have asked me my preferred shipper/broker for the return of my equipment.