My recent column on repairing vintage speakers generated a flood of e-mail. There were a few common themes.
The first regards repair centers. If the gear is less than 10 years old, your best bet might be sending it to the manufacturer.
Certain equipment is probably not worth repairing because of the cost and obsolescence. A good example of this is an AV receiver without HDMI. It might be useful as a stereo receiver in a music system, but without HDMI it doesn't belong in a modern home-theater setup.
The same goes for disc players. If your DVD player, CD player or Blu-ray player dies, you should consign it to the junk heap.
Vintage stereo receivers, preamplifiers and amplifiers often are worth repairing. A good deal of this equipment (especially from the 1980s and early 1990s) is much better than current low-priced stereo gear. Fine brands from this period include NAD, Adcom, Rotel and Harman/Kardon.
A competent audio repair shop should be able to fix them. Good shops include Atlas Audio Repair (www.atlasaudiorepair.com) and Galaxie Electronics (www.galaxieelectronics.com), which are in Pennsylvania but accept repairs from anywhere.
If you know of good repair shops near you, please tell me about them so I can share them with other readers.
I had at least 20 e-mails about repairing speakers with rotting woofer surround foam. A common concern is the cost of shipping a speaker to the company I recommended, Speaker Exchange (www.speakerex.com) in Tampa, Fla. You don't have to ship the entire speaker. You can just remove the woofer, pack it up and send it. It's usually easy to remove.
