AudioProz

Did a bang up job on my Apt Holman Pre. Very fast and excellent work.

The cats who know, know. If you care about your stereo equipment, Vince at AudioProz is the kind of guy you want working on it. He did a dynamite job servicing my turntable — and he did it in a day!
Vince would be the first to admit he’s borderline savant, but this is what makes him so good: whatever he lacks in social grace is made up for in the passion and skill he applies to his work. Set aside some time when you call or stop by, because you’ll get an earful of informed opinion on his area of expertise. The more you’re interested in what he has to say, the better. It’s cluttered with all kinds of military-​grade receivers, tuners, reel-​to-​reels, speakers, cables, some guitar gear (amps, rack gear), and other hi-​fi swag. Also if you buy a piece from him, you know it’s going to be good.
If you insist on buying the cheapie stuff and the Geek Squad in matching shirts can’t fix it, drop it off at the thrift shop and go back to your earbuds.

The staff at Audioproz have encyclopedic knowledge of Hi-​Fidelity. Their diagnostic skills are nonpareil. After repeated visits i go with confidence because everything I’ve ever had them work on was fixed right THE FIRST TIME!
From vintage Marantz turntables to Conrad-​Johnson tube preamps they have fixed them all.
I recommend them without reservation.
Many reviewers have commented on the demeanor of the owner. It is indisputable that he’s an irascible fellow given to expressing his opinions very directly. For my part I don’t go there looking for a friend-​but I place high value on his extraordinary knowledge of relevant subjects. I just shut up and listen-​I always learn something!
If you value your gear and want fast work of the highest quality this is the place.

Nowadays, companies expect people to throw things away when they break or wear out. But it is stupid and expensive to throw nice stereo equipment away if it can be repaired. I brought my four worn out Advent speakers, which I bought in the 1970s, to Audio Proz. My local repair shop told me to throw them away, but I knew that was not right. Now my living room sounds better than a movie theater when we watch movies, and my speakers probably sound way better than most home theater systems.
If you take your stereo for repair here, it is not like going to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. I can see why someone would get a bad impression because this shop is old school, which I personally enjoyed a lot. If you give a deposit, it is to pay the technician to spend time evaluating the repair. I was willing to spend the money up front– if you aren’t, then think twice. The repairs turned out great and I had a great experience, so I am glad that I did. So my advice to anyone going to AudioProz is to have a little patience and respect for the type of repair place this is and then you will probably have a positive result.

Best audio shop in the Boston area by 100 miles, easily. Staff is friendly and super knowledgeable.

Ok, so the owner, Vince, is highly opinionated on a wide range of subjects. If some of the other reviewers had taken the time to actually converse with him, as I did, they would have found him to be an engaging and interesting guy.
That said, when I take my stereo equipment to be repaired, I am less interested in the personalities involved that I am in their competence and professionalism. On that score, they rate a perfect 5 stars from me. Whether Vince is likable or not has nothing to do with old vacuum tubes, dead diodes and replacement caps.
My dad built a Dynakit 70 amp more than 50 years ago. For a long time after he passed away it was boxed up in the attic. Four years ago I had it repaired and it worked fine until it started burning fuses several weeks ago. I took it over to Vince and long story short he and his staff did a fine job of bringing it up to spec. It is working perfectly – better today with my streaming music from Pandora than it did back in the day, when in the evenings it amped out «Victory at Sea» and during the day (when dad wasn’t home!) early Doors for me.
I respect people with passion. I respect mad artists. Vince is the former, and if he is the latter, too, all the better.

The issue here, as many have commented on, is simply that the owner Vince is not a likable guy. He is completely unaware of how he comes across and social skills are poor. He will never win a congeniality contest. If he didnt own this business I think he’d be fired – not for lack of knowledge, which he obviously has, but for lack of people skills. So be prepared before you walk in and if you can deal with him the service is okay. Many people want both – good work and someone who knows how to treat people.

I’d put the rating for AudioProz somewhere between 2 and 3 stars. Vince is impatient, inflexible and likes to expound endlessly on his opinion of home and professional audio. He seems either unaware or unfazed when the person to whom he is speaking is not interested in being lectured. His employees are actually very nice and a pleasure to deal with, but Vince has to come sign off on everything, so if you go there, you will just have to be prepared to work with him. They did some nice work on a pair of vintage speakers for me, although their service prices tend to be more expensive than those at other good places. If you’re just looking for parts, their prices are a bit more reasonable.

STAY FAR AWAY! What an absolute nightmare.
Not only is their customer service downright miserable, but Vince, the owner, has serious anger management issues.
Long story short, I am a professional DJ and I brought my two Technics 1200 turntables in for maintenance and to have the RCA cables and ground wire changed and upgraded. Both turntables were working perfectly, with the exception of one of the RCA cables being intermittent with a loss of sound, hence the request to change out the cables.
Vince insisted that they may need to do more serious work after they look at the decks, and I said money is no object, just get these puppies working the bet they can.
I got a call three days later to pick up. I came in, thanked them for the quick service, paid about $ 100 per table, and went out the door.
I had no time to test before my gig, so I got to my gig and set the tables up. First thing I noticed was that they didn’t change out the ground wires. I had one chewed up wire and I noticed right away. WTF? This was the only thing I asked them to do. I plugged it in and the thing started buzzing like crazy. Mind you, this did not happen before I brought it in.
Not only did then not do the work I asked, they actually broke my turntable! Thank GOD I had a backup table, or the gig would have been ruined.
I brought the deck back the next day, and they INSISTED that it was fine, they had checked it before it went out the door, and that I was crazy. They out it up on the bench and of course, buzzing right away. I asked for my money back, and I got a lot of yelling from Vince plus a big Fuck You (!). Who says fuck you to a paying customer after they broke the turntable they were supposed to simply change wires on? Unbelievable! Seriously, I have better things to do then sit here and type crap on Unilocal,but I need to let everyone know to stay away from this bastard. He refused to give me a full refund, only partial. Now I have to try to fix the problem they caused. Unreal. STAY FAR AWAY!

I brought my father’s vintage receiver in for repair. I paid the $ 40 deposit and was told it would be at least 2 weeks.
2 weeks later I get a call from the shop and am told that it will be simply too expensive to repair and not worth the repair costs or time. I was made to feel like I shouldn’t have wasted their time with it in the first place.
Had I received my deposit back, I might have felt differently, but why would I ever want to do business here again – I assume I’ll just get the same runaround about possibly bad equipment and they’ll take my $ 40 again. No thanks.
Based on all the other reviews, it’s pretty clear to me that if the owner is happy/​in a good mood/​likes you/​approves of your equipment, you have a good experience. But if not, you have a bad experience. That’s really no way to conduct a business that is customer-​service based.

My vintage Pioneer Amp that I bought from these guys started malfunctioning and I was left without music for a while. I’ve had the amp for about 2 ½ years and i understand that old equipment is going to eventually go bad because of old parts. So instead of bringing the amp immediately to these guys for repair, I decided it was time to play with a new amp.
I plugged my speakers in added a sub woofer and center speaker to the new amp and it just sounded like crap to me. I missed the sound signature that came from my Pioneer amp that was described to me by the audio proz at the store.
So i eventually sent my old pioneer amp in for repair and got it back the following week working beautifully. My ears are melting right now from the beautiful music coming out of my speakers with the help of my amp. These guys know their stuff and the owner might be a bit rough when you talk to him, but hes just direct, to the point and im sure truly wants to help you when it comes to your audio needs.

this place is a weird scene.

I went in here over 10 years ago and I can’t believe they’re still around. I traded in a multitrack recorder here for another one. Because the one I had wasn’t working, I had to pay an additional amount, as expected. However, as it turned out, the one that I got from Vince had a plethora of problems and since it was used he wouldn’t take it back. I ended up having to bring it over to Aztech and pay more money to have them replace a bunch of parts on it. Moral of the story: don’t go here. Not only do they sell faulty equipment, but to be frank, the owner is condescending and has no problem talking down to customers. Stay away from this place.

These guys took care of my Sansui G-​9000 it was damaged in shipping due to the seller not double boxing a 70 pound receiver also the previous shop (‘s) that worked on it never found the real problem.
Audio Pro only had it for a few days and had it back to me working perfect.
It sounds great and I’m very glad I went there.
They really did a great job!
The shop is awesome and has many silver faced equipment for sale and the guys really know their stuff.
I will return to this shop for service/​purchases and suggest it to friends.
They were very up front with me and honest about all of the repairs done the write up was 3 pages long detailing what had been done to repair the unit.
Vince also took the time to go through the whole thing with me explaining everything about the repair which was awesome!
Don’t be fooled by the Best Buy’s of the world just visit this shop they will hook you up assuming you sort of know what it is your looking for ;)

If you have a malfunctioning or damaged piece of audio equipment, take it to Audio Pro. I was a little reluctant to trust them with my stuff based on some reviews I’d seen, but now that my repairs are done I am a fan! I first heard about Audio Pro from a short YouTube video titled «The Audio Environmentalist” – check it out. Vince’s philosophy of keeping perfectly good older equipment out of landfills struck a chord with me, so I decided to give him a try.
The two items I had repaired were a Marantz receiver and an Aiwa mini system that were both manufactured around 1997. Each cost me a little over $ 300 originally, so we’re not talking about fancy audiophile equipment – just decent older stuff that still sounds great. After 13 years or so some movers had bashed in the headphone jack on the Marantz receiver and the Aiwa’s cassette deck and CD player were just about dead. I liked the idea of getting this stuff fixed instead of buying shiny new black plastic boxes that in most ways probably wouldn’t have been as nice. Turns out I made the right decision – both systems are now as good as new.
The Marantz receiver was fixed in about six days, which was a little faster than I expected. They took a lot longer with the Aiwa system. I eventually found the delay frustrating, mainly because I didn’t know this shop well and I started to wonder if the job would ever get done. In fairness, when I took the Aiwa in I did tell them to take all the time they needed. Also, it’s a compact consumer stereo that is not exactly cost-​effective to repair. The other audio shop I approached refused to repair it at all.
In the end, my patience paid off and Audio Pro did a great job. I will say that Vince can come across as a little abrasive at times. He’s running a busy shop and he seems to have a short fuse. If your own fuse is on the short side or if you’re in the habit of insisting that the customer is always right you should still go to Audio Pro, but you’ll have a better experience if you resolve ahead of time to keep that attitude in check. Come on, you can do it!
One of the other main guys at Audio Pro – Ken – also helped me out a lot by patiently answering questions and generally exuding professionalism. I’m really happy to have my two stereos working again thanks to these guys. Five stars.
A final note – they also sell a lot of really nice equipment, both old and new. Anyone interested in audio should check this place out.

Update on a piece I had taken in before the CDP. I took in a Sansui AU 517 to have him do a complete service on. He said he would do this and that and have it up and running perfectly. Dropped it off on Wed., they called on Fri and said it was ready. Got it home and had been playing it for about a month and a half or so. Started having this issue when the speaker selector was flipped to A, the left channel came on and the right channel sounded garbly and then came on after a few seconds. Was also getting a «thump» from the left speaker when flipping selector as well. This was not cool by me. I immediately took all covers off, got some de oxit and started hunting for bad parts. Come to find out that there were at least 6 – 8 parts with tons of corrosion on them, parts with the «brown glue» that he said he would remove, and caps bulging. So I pulled the board with the bad resistor that had broken from corrosion, took it to Audio Lab in Cambridge and they fixed the bulging cap and resistor for $ 35. (Very fair in my opinion). Picked it up, re installed it and still I got the garble and pause for right channel.
Took it back apart, did some more fishing. Found more corrosion on PCB with yet another resistor breaking from this. Sat and questioned myself about what to do. This was an area where I couldn’t pull the board myself.
I decided that because the resistor was just behind some caps, I would teach myself to solder and do it myself. Did it the next day and no more pauses in right channel :) Asked about DC Offset and Bias settings on AudioKarma and found out that they would be out of whack after changing parts. Bought a multimeter and checked everything myself once again. Found that the DC Offset in the left channel was almost 1V (supposed to be 0mv +/​-​5. This explained the «thump» in the left channel.
So after all was said and done, I paid Audio Pro $ 200 to do absolutely nothing but clean some of the switches. Total waste of time and money!
As the saying goes, «If you want something done right, then do it yourself.»
DO NOT GIVE THESE GUYS ANY OF YOUR HARD EARNED $$$$!!!