I lived in Los Angeles for many years. I had a lot of stereo equipment serviced there with some good and some less than good experiences. In all cases as a rule all service outlets charged a hefty fee to even look at my piece of equipment. And the turn-around-time was always many weeks.
Since I moved back to my home state of Texas, I'm living now in San Antonio with my relatively high-end audio equipment. After a bad weather electrical storm my main 9 channel, Yamaha Aventage, 180 Watt per channel, receiver wouldn't turn on at all. Just black, no sound. I had a hunch it's main board was fried. I took it and an older 15" subwoofer which was now making scratchy noises to Sound Idea and spoke with Gilbert there. Never been there before but the guy on the phone, Gilbert seemed to know what he was talking about even trying to give me free advice over the phone.
Mind you that I know for a fact that if were to go to any service outlet in LA, as a rule the clueless person working the front counter would write up a ticket, taking dictation from me as to what the problem was in my opinion, charge me $75 and up, and tell me they'd call me with a diagnosis in a few weeks. When you'd pick up the unit after diagnosis/repair one of three things would happen: 1.) They'd tell me they couldn't repair it, while keeping the up front diagnostic deposit 2.) They would have found an actual problem which they did repair and would charge me the highest fee they could get away with regardless of how much time it took or the cost of the replacement parts or 3.) They'd tell me all the things that were "wrong" even if there had been nothing wrong with it at all other than the need to reset some circuit breakers which took 5 minutes of secret code to complete without even removing the case. And then they'd charge me the highest fee they could get away with.
In sharp contrast, to my shock, here's what happened with Gilbert and Sound Idea: First Gilbert took the sub back to the work room, never wasting time to write up a ticket, came back in less than ten minutes and said it was't the speaker but the amplifier board was bad and it probably couldn't be repaired or even if parts were available they wouldn't pencil out to be worth it for an older subwoofer. No charge for the diagnosis, the advice and no wait!
Next he took the very heavy high-end but non-responsive receiver back to the work room, no ticket written up. He returned again in about 10 minutes and put the receiver back on the counter. He said, "It's working." I said, what did you do? He said, "I reset it with a series of codes." Then I said, "Wow! Thank you! How much do I owe you?" Gilbert said, "Eh.....$XX." Such a modest fee for honest advice with no wait was highly worth it. I practically fainted!
No ticket, no eight week wait, no lying or deception and no exorbitant charge. No kidding! You need to go to these guys before anybody else. Talk about honest quality service. They said it's an old German family owned business. It's located in a small heavily-worn old building. You can tell it's been there for more than the "approximately 50 years or more" they told me that they've been there at that location. I could tell by the long conversation I had with Gilbert and another owner P.J. that these folks really know what they're talking about and that they/re so honest. They did say that they're so busy making repairs that their turn around time for more serious work than mine might take eight weeks to repair. I'm sure it probably would since who else in the state of Texas has this kind of knowledge and can show that kind of home-grown honesty and customer service. Thank you Gilbert and P.J.! I'll be back...... read more
