When I was doing repair, the shops referred to the charge for lifting your set onto their workbench as the "bench press." It was usually given as a minimum labor time charge, such as 1 hour. You were doing well if you could get most repairs done in less than an hour. This depended on having both excellent diagnostic skill, and the experience to know what component was most likely to fail.

I ended up in an Apple repair shop within a government agency that served school districts. Since we didn't need to make a profit, we skipped the bench press, and if your Apple needed 15 minutes of work (typical), we charged for 15 minutes, while also letting you watch.

The pinnacle was TV repair because TVs were expensive but cheaply made and relatively simplistic. There were not many different ways that they worked due to the evolution of cost cutting measures. There were also good published repair guides -- the Howard Sams "photofact" series.

Stereos were not all that much more complicated, but a contemporary repair shop would suffer from lack of sufficient business to sustain a working knowledge of failures and repairs, and often obsolete or irreplaceable components such as output transistors. Paying $150 to sustain the shop, and learn that your set is unrepairable, are not far-fetched outcomes.

Also (in the amplified musical instrument world that I now inhabit), there's a declining number of good techs. For one thing, those guys can make a lot more money servicing million dollar industrial or medical equipment.

I was more than fine with the $150... which is why I paid it. I've had motorcycle shops do similar things and that's fine too.

I think I was too subtle in my response though. The fact that they didn't call me after a month to tell me that it was broken beyond repair, feels kind of like they were never going to fix it.

I had a similar experience once with a quadraphonic receiver from the 70s. When I went to pick it up the shop owner gave me the schematics and said he’d never seen anything that complex before. It was probably a dozen or more pages long. Even the AM/FM receiver dial pulley diagram was complex. I wanted to use it as a pet project but ultimately gave it away due to other priorities and lack of space.

It wasn’t completely broken though! Various features just didn’t work. The whole system was insane. Each speaker cabinet had (iirc) 15” subs in it. Nowadays we have Atmos height speakers that are marketed as something completely new but these speakers had vertically oriented treble horns even back then. Modern speakers certainly have frequency response, efficiency, and compactness going for them, but to this day I’ve never heard any consumer system (I used to sell them in college) that loud. I rarely turned the volume past three (out of ten). I was only brave enough to briefly turn it up to seven once. When I did lights I’d never seen work illuminated. I felt Led Zeppelin in my chest.

I charge 300 quid to even look at a piece of equipment that's been "re-capped". Some people pay that, presumably because they realise that's the price of having the damage inflicted by the poke-and-hope brigade repaired.