Uber expensive repair at United Radio

Next time try Lyft. They are usually cheaper.

Unlike some of the "deep pockets" around here, I’m sympathetic though I’m not so surprised about the hourly rate as by the time required. An explanation about why the repairs required 14 hours might make the final bill easier to accept. Fourteen hours seems a lot. Inserting (plug-in?) chipsets seems like it should have taken maybe 5 minutes, but that’s 7 hours per amp...so a full day on each. Did you supply the replacement chipsets or did they? AND were they the ones to diagnose bad chipsets as the problem?? Diagnosing would certainly add to the time required. I’m no EE and haven’t a clue how deeply buried inside the amps the chipsets were. Maybe there was a good deal of careful parts removal to get to their location? Afterwards reassembly and warm up followed by some (re-biasing or other "tuning"?) with bench testing on a ’scope?? Maybe even actually playing some music to confirm successful repair! Might help to ask for details about what the job entailed.

PS - not to add fuel to your fire but $1971/14 = $140.79 per hour.  Given the quoted $120 per hour, maybe that does include cost of the chipsets.

This thread is delivering on every level

"...I feel like a cheap old bastard :-). Final reply on this subject..."

I feel your pain, $2000 for a repair is a lot of money but if it goes back in service for another decade or more, probably well spent.  

Just realize the subject of the thread, when I finally looked in..

Classe 600 monoblocks.
I nearly worked on one, once (last year). I regained my senses at the last minute... and since classe had been reborn, so to speak, I had the store involved send it back to classe.

I’ll take on just about anything, electronically, a good electronics fistfight and beatings (emerge with black eyes but triumphant) or whatever... but that amp ... is a bit of a bear, to say the least. This, when I spent a good 20 years repairing audio commando style --- no schematics, ever. Is one a tech or a board swapper? Lets see who’s really got it, or not...can you hang with the tough crowd, or will you crash and burn? What does one do when discipline, logic, brains, and patience are required?

Any tech looking inside of it and seeing what it is.... and dealing with a ’ghost in the machine’, with overbearing unknown software that serves as a lock out on error.... means that finding that ghost, from a position of ignorance about the circuit... makes buying lottery tickets look like a better idea.

One of those ones that should be left with the orignal company that made it. They are really not all that common, these overbearingly complex unknowns about complex unknowns... but this is one of them. I hate giving in and and rarely do, but this was one of those rare times.

These are not all that common and you are from the Kingston area?

Maybe it was your amp that I turned down repairing...