So I'm a Repair Technician for a Professional Audio Equipment distributor in Australia. I'm tasked mainly with Service and hands-on repairs... Someone buys a product from a Music shop (could be a Microphone, Guitar Amp, Monitor Speaker or Rack Gear etc.) and it dies or gets busted, the unit comes into our Workshop and gets taken care of with either a repair, or replacement (if unrepairable or cost inefficient to attempt repair).
Obviously there are differing warranty periods for different products and a repair is either free (in warranty) or chargeable (warranty expired, or not a manufacturing defect).

Now, the way this works is very similar to say a Car Mechanics workshop. First, you drop your unit in, where we'll take a look at it and let you know potentially what the issue is and how much it'll cost. This is the appraisal and quotation portion of the process, we let you know what work is required to be done, what parts are going to be needed and roughly how much it'll cost. The clincher here is that this 'appraisal' is considered chargeable as it often takes time to suss out what can cause some issues, so we have a minimum quote charge of $45 which is absorbed into the costs of labour if you decide to go ahead with repairs. This is relayed to every customer in these situations as it was with DouchbagSpeakerGuy (DSG from now on).

So DSG drops by our head office and is informed of the process, nods and agrees to everything, whilst dropping off his Monitor Speaker. The speaker is a fairly well-known brand made by an English manufacturer with some weird operating policies (which will be referred to later).

So basically, I treat the repair as any other and it gets added to the queue... apparently, this isn't good enough and DSG invokes the classic "I'm a professional Soundie and my gear needs to be up and running again by the weekend". Fine, whatever, I red-flag the unit to give our admin lady a break from this guy. I pull the unit apart and lo and behold there are several dropping resistors burnt through (open circuit), a transistor taken down and the bloody transformer for the unit has shat itself (it's the big shiny squarey-rectangle thing in the bottom right of this photo_ ).
Let me just add, if you look closely at where the circuit boards hit the black aluminium backing, you can see some browny-residue... This is, in fact, glue that has been lovingly slavered all over the circuit board to stop stuff resonating//rattling in the poweramp module. It is, by far, the most insidious shit I've ever encountered en-masse in a production run of professional speakers. It slowly becomes hard, brittle and all around a shitfight to work with. Attempting to remove ANY of these boards from the backing plate (which is necessary to locate faulty components and install new ones) before removing the glue can result in snapped//chipped circuit boards and that will really ruin your day.

What I'm trying to relay with all of this is that it took a long time just to get DSG's speaker to a point where I could make a call on what was wrong with it. The other little inconvenience was that the manufacturer of the Speaker (remember I said they were a bit weird operationally?)... well, they don't actually supply parts for this model of speaker any more... in fact the unit's only 6 years old they've completely discontinued post-support for it in any measure, so if it's anything more than a component level fix, the entire speaker is basically a write-off (bar some custom part-sourcing, which I can totally do). Hence, the Transformer being unavailable and me not being able to repair the unit.
BUT I don't like when a unit gets the better of me, so I phone around and start collecting information. I know a local Sydney company that do custom Transformers for pretty cheap... I get some figures on that, get a list of all the IC's and passive components needed and tally it all up. Furthermore, I document a step-by-step A3 print-out (full colour and several pages long) on the process involved in rewiring the circuit boards power-rails to the transformer (pretty easy, I colour coded all the wiring, labelled it all and made a Key/Legend on the A3 print out so a child could have done it). At this point, I rang up DSG and discussed where he would like to go with the Speaker. I spent a good 13 minutes on the phone, explaining that although The Manufacturer no longer sell the parts to fix the unit as is - I can source everything and am willing to do the leg-work if DSG wants to pay for the new tranformer, repair costs and labour... The total was about $270 (rough estimate, probably a little lower as I tend to over-shoot my guesstimates).

DSG sounds perturbed over the phone about how it shouldn't cost that much and in fact We and the Manufacturer should be fixing it for free and mumbles something about not being told the whole story and that he was going to approach 'Manufacturer of Speaker' about it (even though the unit was several years out of Warranty and though the aftermarket service was poor, the manufacturer were well within their rights to discontinue the selling of parts.

In the end DSG says that he will come and collect the unit and explore other avenues. I tell him 'that's fine, I've included some documentation of the repair process, the items you'll need, colour coded the wiring, the EXACT dimensions and specifications of the Transformer you'll need to have made and basically a hand-made repair document//service manual for the speaker'.

So DSG comes to collect the unit, I hand over the box and a display folder of the A3 pages of documentation and ask him how he'll be paying for the quote//services... a charge of $45.

'What SERVICE?... you didn't fix the bloody thing, I'm not paying no one!'.

"Sorry 'Name of customer', it's our standard charge for looking at any unit, I actually spent a good couple of hours collating this info and tracking down specs for you, I really should be charging you closer to $200 for my time".

"Well, my speakers not fixed, I see what you've done but I don't see why I should have to pay if I'm still leaving with a dead speaker".

"Look, I realise it's not the best outcome but I've done as good as I possibly can with regards to what I've been given to work with - the manufacturer has pulled support on the product, that's just how it is. Besides, you knew the about the quotation charge before you dropped the unit off".

"I knew that my speaker was supposed to be fixed too, I ain't paying no one until it is".

At this point, the level of anger rising in me gives me a rush of adrenaline, so I tell him to wait, walk upstairs to the Product Manager and explain it as quickly as possible. Product Manager tells me to just let it go (Everyone always seems willing to bend over for the customer - That's probably why I could never be a manager).

Defeated, I come back downastairs, take the speaker off the counter and head back to my workbench for a quick bit of reverse-engineering. I proceed to rip out all of the colour-coding on the wires, all the witness marks and ID points on the circuit boards (which I had placed there solely for DSG's benefit). I quickly solder the faulty components back into the PCB (transistor around the wrong way, I might add ;) ) and head back out to the trade counter. I see that DSG is looking through the documentation I wrote him, but he covertly places the A3 sheets under his arm as I hand the speaker to him... Ohhhhhh no you don't you little tightarse, I quickly think to myself.
"I'll take that documentation back mate, enjoy your speaker".
DSG looks surprised as I slide the A3 pages out from under his armpit and bin it right in front of him. At that point, I'm pretty sure that DSG realises he's just lost his best chance of ever getting those speakers repaired for anything less than the $270 that I quoted him.

It's all a bit silly really, they're quite nice speakers and (IMO) definitely worth having fixed. Together, they would've cost about $1300 for the pair initially - $200 a fix isn't really that bad when compared to the initial cost.

Furthermore, I've red-flagged the guys name in our system... If he ever pops up again, I've gotten permission from our manager to turn him away for any repair work, as he's been identified as a non-paying customer. He really shot himself in the foot as we're the only licensed repair agent for many brand names in industry, so unless he goes overseas, there's no one else in our entire State with access to schematics and circuit diagrams for a lot of Pro Audio Gear but us :)