April 05, 2023 / By mobanmarket
Lately I’ve been hearing stories about people getting back into hi-fi, often from the people themselves. Some are buying new gear, but others have dug out and dusted off older equipment. Demand for electronics repair services was surging even before the pandemic. Once it struck, once and future audiophiles stuck at home plumbed their basements, attics, and storage units and pulled out old hi-fi components, hoping to resurrect them, only to find they weren’t working, or not well.
Should they get ’em fixed?
There’s much to consider: The type, age, quality, and condition of the component, how it was stored, how much you’re willing to spend to restore it, and how much patience you have. Repairs may not be straightforward. Parts may be scarce. Schematics may be missing. Your area may lack technicians with the necessary skills. And yet, some things are worth fixing.
I recently spoke with John Pravel of Luxman’s North American sales division about the surging demand for electronic component servicing. Skilled, experienced technicians are scarce, he said, and their numbers are dwindling. “Analog circuitry isn’t being taught at 2-year colleges,” Pravel told me. “We need to find older guys to mentor younger guys. We need more people doing this.”
Luxman frequently gets calls from people who want to have, say, their 40-year-old amplifier repaired. “We just don’t have all the parts,” he said. Service centers they work with do their best to source and stock parts.
Over the decades, Luxman, a 95-year-old brand, has undergone several changes in ownership and shifts in priorities. Knowledge has been lost. Parts have been destroyed or disposed of to save space. It’s the same at other companies with long histories. And many have vanished, leaving little behind. Sometimes parts are quarantined due to liability concerns, Pravel told me: They exist, but you’re not allowed to use them.
I visited an old audio service shop in Cincinnati, Ohio, Stereo Advantage, which refurbishes, repairs, and sells used gear: 1940s radios, turntables, electronics, and more. Their owner, Allan Howard, who took over in 2011, says they’re busy. The average turnaround time on repairs is a few weeks. Sometimes it takes longer. The place was jammed with gear.
I also spoke briefly, by phone, with Bill, Stereo Advantage’s main service technician (footnote 1). “We’ve been here 42 years,” he said. “I’m about to turn 68 in a few days. It’s getting harder and harder to work on this microsurgery. … We try to fix everybody’s problem. We always try; sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail.”
Not everything’s a treasure. “A lot of it is just junk, really,” Bill told me. “If it’s made in China, throw it away.” They sometimes receive mid-fi to higher-end gear from makers like Marantz or McIntosh. If the condition is good and parts are available, it may be worth repairing.
Speaking of McIntosh: Mike Holtzman, that company’s regional sales manager, told me by phone that they get calls “all the time” for repairs of older equipment. “Consumers will wait a little longer for out-of-warranty repairs than for newer equipment,” he said. “If it’s older and needs all new caps and resistors, for instance, it could take more time.” McIntosh repairs usually aren’t too difficult, he said, because the “[circuit] boards are well laid out and simple,” especially for tube gear. “The design of the guts, the accessibility to repair the product, have made repair techs’ jobs easier—even to get the probes inside for testing,” Holtzman said. “That’s what they tell me.”
For repair potential, tube gear generally fares better than solid state. “It’s the transistor units that are more difficult because of the more complex circuitry,” Pravel said. Tube circuitry is simpler. Point-to-point wiring can be easier to work with. New and new-old-stock tubes are more widely available than vintage transistors. “Harvesting parts from several [donor] units to get a good working one—it can be done if the end user is patient enough.”
One problem is that old solder contains lots of lead, which doesn’t comply with current environmental directives. It can be hard to remove, and newer solder isn’t as compatible with older circuit boards.
“It’s really an art to get vintage equipment repaired today in a quality way,” Pravel said. “Backward-compatible parts, soldering techniques, and so on … require patience and bench skills, and lots of experience and test equipment.” Customers can expect the process to involve a bench fee, then diagnostics, an estimate for approval, parts sourcing, and so on. It probably won’t be fast, and it may not be cheap. Some dealers are adding or expanding repair services at their bricks-and-mortar facilities. It’s a profit center, it serves clients’ needs, and it gets people in the door where they can see what’s new.
Why not just buy something new? Sometimes it makes sense. A guy I know has KLH Model Twenty speakers, a Technics SA-5200A receiver, and a Technics SL-1300 direct-drive turntable in his basement. A former electrical engineer, he could fix his own gear; he has done so before. But he’s more interested in streaming. He wants to watch movies, too. “I wanted a receiver that could do both two-channel and home theater,” he said of his decision to buy newer components. “It’s also easier to integrate my subwoofer. I also have a Chromecast audio device that allows 24/96 Chromecast that I run into the receiver’s digital audio input. So I can get audio through a few different means.”
Whatever audiophiles do with their gear, old or new, the good news is that, thanks to streaming and vinyl’s continued resurgence, more people than ever are listening to more types of music in more ways than ever before.
Footnote 1: Bill, who’s also referred to as “HorrorBill,” declined to give his last name.
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