Fixing Broken Car Amps

[Wingman0121 10+ year member]

Now just a question for all you guys wondering where your amp is... why would you send your expensive amp to some random dude on the internet and not to an actual shop? Not to discredit Mike but seems like there's a problem.

There's a electronic repair shop that also repairs car audio amps about 2 hours away from me, it's called Elite Services in Eau Claire WI. They repaired my Proton D1200 home amp a few years ago, took them about two months(it was a hard one I was told) but the repair was done well AND they tested it in front of me when I went to pick it up. They have a physical shop and address plus they've been there for many years so in case if there's a problem you won't be left out in the cold.

Check it out...

eliteserviceonline.com

 

[audiophile831 10+ year member]

Mike fixed an american bass vfl 500.1 that i sent him. Comunication was great at the beginning but ****** after i gave him a deposit for parts. He had the amp for well over a month. When he emailed me that he would need the rest of the money as he had finished the amp and needed payment to ship, i paid him the next day. I then got promised several times that my amp would get shipped so and so day and didnt happen. It went on like this for about 2 weeks until i lost my patience and was pretty much hounding him everyday until he shipped it. I got the amp and tested it and would not power on. I flipped the amp around and was missing some screws on the back cover. All screws where there before. I opened it to find that there was some metal bars that were not soldered to the board properly. I pushed these in and amp powered right up. At that point i wanted to call mike out on this but really didnt want to Spend money shipping it out to him again and not knowing when i would get it back. I took it to a local tv repair shop and charged me 30 bucks to solder those bars back to the board. The guy at the repair shop said work was done around the area where the soldering was needed. Amp works great tho. The packaging when mike returned me the amp ******. Was not really padded as well as when i shipped it to him. Mike might do good work but i think he has taken on too much work as to what he can handle. I think if he doesnt improve his comunication, no matter how affordable repair services he offers he simply wont last long here much longer.

 

[05fronty 5,000+ posts]

Now just a question for all you guys wondering where your amp is... why would you send your expensive amp to some random dude on the internet and not to an actual shop? Not to discredit Mike but seems like there's a problem.
There's a electronic repair shop that also repairs car audio amps about 2 hours away from me, it's called Elite Services in Eau Claire WI. They repaired my Proton D1200 home amp a few years ago, took them about two months(it was a hard one I was told) but the repair was done well AND they tested it in front of me when I went to pick it up. They have a physical shop and address plus they've been there for many years so in case if there's a problem you won't be left out in the cold.

Check it out...

eliteserviceonline.com

this

 

[gammey4 10+ year member]

To all those that have nothing usefull to add I think we all see the error of our ways. At this point we all are trying to get our gear back and just move on. The post's asking why we did it or saying this is what happens when joe schom fixes your amp or whatever arent helping anyone.

 

[XxedgarxX 10+ year member]

Mike fixed an american bass vfl 500.1 that i sent him. Comunication was great at the beginning but ****** after i gave him a deposit for parts. He had the amp for well over a month. When he emailed me that he would need the rest of the money as he had finished the amp and needed payment to ship, i paid him the next day. I then got promised several times that my amp would get shipped so and so day and didnt happen. It went on like this for about 2 weeks until i lost my patience and was pretty much hounding him everyday until he shipped it. I got the amp and tested it and would not power on. I flipped the amp around and was missing some screws on the back cover. All screws where there before. I opened it to find that there was some metal bars that were not soldered to the board properly. I pushed these in and amp powered right up. At that point i wanted to call mike out on this but really didnt want to Spend money shipping it out to him again and not knowing when i would get it back. I took it to a local tv repair shop and charged me 30 bucks to solder those bars back to the board. The guy at the repair shop said work was done around the area where the soldering was needed. Amp works great tho. The packaging when mike returned me the amp ******. Was not really padded as well as when i shipped it to him. Mike might do good work but i think he has taken on too much work as to what he can handle. I think if he doesnt improve his comunication, no matter how affordable repair services he offers he simply wont last long here much longer.

same thing happen to me even tho i havent added power to mine yet you can see pics a couple pages back

 

[dB-r 10+ year member]

HMMM... This must be why we have gotten so busy lately here at dB-r.....

Thanks to all the customers who support us and refer business to us etc. We do appreciate it. We are expanding to handle more amplifier repairs than we ever have in the past, but STILL, sorry, the only problem that some people have with us is that we don't service ALL amplifiers... That, unfortunately isn't changing much. BUT, for the amps that we do service, things are speeding up already. In the past it's only been myself and 1 other guy, and we can bust our butts and get a bunch of amps done and shipped, and then when the UPS man shows up, here we go again, 5-6 new boxes of amps coming in at a time, sometimes every day.... SO I finally found a guy here local that is capable and training him right now, so far he is doing good, so we will have a 3rd person here. I know that doesn't seem like much, but since we are such a small outfit, adding even 1 more worker adds 33% to our capacity, so it is a big deal.

Looking forward to doing more business with you guys. I know I personally haven't been on these forums much (any of the popular car audio forums) but that's just because I am so busy! Good to see things haven't changed much here, just mainly the layout.

 

[05fronty 5,000+ posts]

HMMM... This must be why we have gotten so busy lately here at dB-r.....
Thanks to all the customers who support us and refer business to us etc. We do appreciate it. We are expanding to handle more amplifier repairs than we ever have in the past, but STILL, sorry, the only problem that some people have with us is that we don't service ALL amplifiers... That, unfortunately isn't changing much. BUT, for the amps that we do service, things are speeding up already. In the past it's only been myself and 1 other guy, and we can bust our butts and get a bunch of amps done and shipped, and then when the UPS man shows up, here we go again, 5-6 new boxes of amps coming in at a time, sometimes every day.... SO I finally found a guy here local that is capable and training him right now, so far he is doing good, so we will have a 3rd person here. I know that doesn't seem like much, but since we are such a small outfit, adding even 1 more worker adds 33% to our capacity, so it is a big deal.

Looking forward to doing more business with you guys. I know I personally haven't been on these forums much (any of the popular car audio forums) but that's just because I am so busy! Good to see things haven't changed much here, just mainly the layout.

this guy does good work

 

[big bass joel 10+ year member]

Yes chris at dbr communicates!

 

[slim2fattycake 10+ year member]

I sent mike a small amp to fix at first and it was fine so that's when I sent him the other amps. I ended up trading 2 amps for fixing one amp. I would definitely send it to chris if he accepted amps as payment. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif But now I guess I'm out 3 amps and nothing.

 

[dB-r 10+ year member]

Man that *****, and no we have too many amps in storage as it is, need to sell them off, have a big yard sale or something here, LOL... You can imagine what the ad in the paper would say...... We are close to hempstead and prairie view...

The only other shops that we REALLY recommend using is Ampmedics (he does good work) or Zed Audio (older stuff). For Best Buy type stuff, like RF, Kicker, etc, we send to a shop in Louisiana called Audio Connection, I haven't heard any complaints about him so far.... Ampmedics, in my opinion, is the best alternative shop, BUT he like us only works on certain amps, he does do Kicker, but doesn't do RF, JL, etc.... So we can't refer everything that we don't do to him. He does great work also, and his prices are about like ours.

I remember seeing this post here months ago, and the price ($25) and just shaking my head........ LOL, I knew it wouldn't turn out good.

 

[big bass joel 10+ year member]

Yeh to goood to be true!

 

[bubbagumper6 5,000+ posts]

Any technician who's worth a damn has burned up $25 worth of his time just by opening the amp and looking at it.

 

[dB-r 10+ year member]

We are a full time repair shop, we do it for a living here.... If your a hobbyist, AND YOU ARE GOOD, I don't have a problem sending people to you for $25 repairs on stuff I don't want to work on, but then you see this stuff here on the forum.... Repairing amps just isn't "for" everyone.... The reason I don't have much help here is it's hard to train new guys to solder correctly, desolder correctly, troubleshoot correctly on 20 different designs of amplifiers, and even just take stuff apart and put it back together properly is a struggle for some.... Anyone starting out repairing amps has to start at the bottom of the barrel. For a while.... I did it 2 years locally before I was confident enough to take my business online. Had to make sure my skills were up to par before I started tearing into 5,000 watt amps.

 

[dB-r 10+ year member]

Also, before people start throwing this out there... We aren't perfect either, we make mistakes (sometimes, not often) and sometimes have slow turnaround times, especially on PITA amps or amps that we really didn't want to work on in the first place. dB-r isn't perfect either, but man we sure do try to make everyone happy, and stay in business in the process, so far I think we have done a good job, we have very few unhappy customers and LOTS of happy ones. I guess can't complain about that!

 

[XxedgarxX 10+ year member]

MIKE i want a refund when ever you see this no butts no tomorrows iit has been a long time and you havent communicate at all

175 here is my paypal edgar.s.g@hotmail.com

THIS IS FOR THE KICKER KX2500

with db-r the only reason i didn't sent it to him was due to he didn't work on my kind of amp and i saw all of mikes comments and they were good but i guess people never open their amps and see what he did...

 

[bubbagumper6 5,000+ posts]

We are a full time repair shop, we do it for a living here.... If your a hobbyist, AND YOU ARE GOOD, I don't have a problem sending people to you for $25 repairs on stuff I don't want to work on, but then you see this stuff here on the forum.... Repairing amps just isn't "for" everyone.... The reason I don't have much help here is it's hard to train new guys to solder correctly, desolder correctly, troubleshoot correctly on 20 different designs of amplifiers, and even just take stuff apart and put it back together properly is a struggle for some.... Anyone starting out repairing amps has to start at the bottom of the barrel. For a while.... I did it 2 years locally before I was confident enough to take my business online. Had to make sure my skills were up to par before I started tearing into 5,000 watt amps.

I can solder like no other but man, trying to chase down problems in a 3kw amplifier is pretty darn hard. It's like an art of it's own...

 

[jco1385 5,000+ posts]

glad i didnt send my 1501d'z

whew!

 

[dB-r 10+ year member]

1501d's, Kicker 2500's, etc, is not something we work on, so that can be a problem, a lot of the "broken" stuff out there is those types of amps, and we just don't work on those here. HOWEVER, if you go to our website and fill out a ticket we can refer you to other shops that will work on your brands of amps, so it's win/win, even if we don't work on it, we can send you somewhere that can, and we will not refer customers to shops that aren't proven, so way better than cruising the internet looking for a random repair shop.

 

[mike49504 10+ year member]

Im am not giving you a refund on the repair for your mp Kicker 2500.1 I have time and money into parts for that amp. I have all new parts here for it. I am way behind on repairs and such and im working day and night to get all amps done i have here. Im trying to get theese amps out within the next week or 2 not just some of them BUT ALL OF THEM. I will send you the money for return shipping for the amp if you want but i will not give you a refund since i have money into parts for the power supply section and time.

 

[hzsogood 5,000+ posts]

Mike. You do understand why everyone is getting extremely annoyed and impatient right? Not only broken promises and complete lack of communication. But amps you say are done or have been done will be " sent out tomorrow". Well people have heard all this for weeks and are frustrated because your not sending them out. If it's done and paid for, it's not hard to send it out!