Ed, the owner of A-B & B Electronics, was the only one who I could find to work on my late 40's…read morePhilco. He had great reviews at the time, so I happily called him. I should've known on our first conversation, or should I say lack thereof, that it was going to become a nightmare. First of all, he doesn't concentrate on the conversation and what I am telling him. In addition, his phone keeps beeping for another call, so I'm continually put on hold. Again, good reviews and honestly, he seems like my last hope on the antique I've had setting for a few years now.
He tells me to bring it to him. Well, it's in a unit. "I don't have room in my garage. You must disassemble."
My husband isn't crazy about that, but we've waited a long time. So he does. Ed wants $40 to "look" at it.
In the 13 months he had the pieces, turntable, amp, and radio, we hardly heard a peep. We had to continually call him for updates, going through the same pattern of terrible communication, phone beeping, put on hold or I'll call you back. I got so frustrated, I pleaded with my husband to take it over. He got so irritated , I had to take it back over because I thought we'll never get it back. Mind you, he's open until 6pm and only open until 1pm on Saturdays. Considering we live 45 minutes away w/out traffic and my husbands works til 5 pm M-F, quite an operation to accomplish.
Thirteen long months later, pushing, pulling, scraping, mustering up every ounce of patience left, we picked it up. In the end he said the original turntable couldn't be fixed and ordered another on EBay and added 15%. Because everything is built in, we had to make a form for it to fit inside. So basically after all that, we got a turntable that worked but we would have to figure out how to put it all back together, apply it so it fit into the unit, because "he didn't have room for the cabinet" to do it himself. When I say fit, the phonograph is screwed to the door and the door opens forward to display the unit that has springs.
The unit sat again for another four months while my husband gathered a plan. Well, yesterday, I had a girlfriend over. We appraised the situation together and after some grinding of metal, used the original form, screwed it all on and played my first record. Hallelujah!
In closing, we paid nearly $345 dollars. Not exactly sure what we got for that except a lot of runaround. Didn't inform us he wanted cash until we were there for pick up. Wasn't going to credit the original $40 that was given as the initial deposit. Good thing I kept my original receipt.
Overall, no matter how desperate, DON'T GO SEE ED. Terrible, the worst communication skills. Nobody needs that much aggrevation in their life. My husband and I still have PTSD and we appreciate each other more for our communication skills.