Repair shops In Massachusetts

[day67]

Thanks, Thedelihaus. I should add that Dave aligned my Kenwood 8300 and my pioneer TX 9800 and both perform excellent. If you look up some of his threads/posts you'll see he has quite a vast knowledge -- and i still think a great sense of humor.

 

[beatcomber]

Whatever you do, do *not* go to Audio Pros in Watertown. Dishonest, immoral, and incompetent. Avoid at all costs.

bs

I'd be curious to hear more details...

 

[bshorey]

I'd be curious to hear more details...

Ok. Just got the Carver back from Grateful today (thanks Dave!), so I will now post full details. Take it for what it's worth.

I went to these guys with a Carver CT-27 preamp and a TFM 45 power amp. I couldn't get any output from the preamp at all, and the power amp had a tremendous buzzing on power up, after which it worked fine.

Went in and talked to Vince. He told me I had some of the 'good' Carvers, and that the problem was usually bad solder joints. He told he he'd resolder all the usual suspects, and that he was confident that would fix the problems in both units. Assured me he could fix them, regardless.

A month or so later I went in to pick up my 'repaired' units.

For the preamp, he charged me $200, and told me "by the way, you need a jumper cable for the inputs and outputs". Silly me, I didn't have a manual for the preamp, and I never would have suspected that a preamp would have what amounts to preamp outs and power amp ins. Live and learn. I was a little miffed, as I felt that an honorable shop would have charged me for a diagnostic and informed me of this, not performed $200 worth of needless work on it. Chalk it up to a lesson in life.

For the power amp, I was told it was now in perfect working condition. This one also cost me $200, and the work done to 'fix' it was resoldering.. When I got it home, it had the same exact buzz as before. I called them, and took it back. Vince started yelling at me right away, that I didn't show up exactly when I said I was going to bring it in, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. He hooked it up and it made the same exact loud buzzing noise as before. Vince then tried to tell me that all Carver units were pieces of s*t (his exact words), and that to fix this problem he would have to order schematics, and redesign major portions of the unit. At great expense, of course. Yeah, right. He was literally screaming at me as I stormed out the door.

Roll forward to today. On the advice of Delihaus and others here in this thread, I finally got around to taking the amp and a couple of other units down to Grateful. I picked up the amp today, to make a long story short it now works perfectly after replacing a single leaking capacitor (Dave replaced the pair, just because, but the root cause of the problem was a single capacitor). The cost was minimal.

So, that's the entire story of my dealings with this place. I'll stand by my original summary of their capabilities. As far as I'm concerned Vince's only capabilities, if any, are with a soldering iron, he's completely incompetent with regards to any kind of troubleshooting, he's dishonest, and he's an a$$hole.

HTH,

bs