Burke Electronics — Local services in Dale City

Recently I have been in touch with a fellow Antonin Scalia School of Law [ASSoL] graduate about a gimmick that could cause people to desire to return to campus for a reunion of sorts. I had the idea of replaying the videotape of the "Follies," a more or less humorous take on the activities of the students and faculty, an iteration of which I undertook 25 years ago. I have been engaged in a bucket list kind of activity involving cataloging books, scanning and then tossing paperwork going back 60 years to elementary school, and digitizing cassette tapes and vinyl records, and part of this effort was to buy or somehow reproduce the betamax tapes wherein the sole known copy of the "Evening of the Living Dead" was called. Have you priced the cost of a working Betamax? The closest I could come was a Craig's List notice that offered 4 non-working machines (3 Sony and 1 Toshiba) for $50 as is. I retrieved them from the seller and tried opening the case to see what my intellect could do to provide insight into the problems of the units. I got my tape wrapped around the capstan and gave up that effort straightaway. I google searched betamax repair and the results were discouraging. But one operation, the so-entitled Burke Electronics mentioned that it serviced VCRs [reminding one of the one-time ubiquity of the JVS VHS VCR]. I reasoned that it was doubtlessly located in the Burke area near where I had my 1st Law Office [my second one becoming an Asian Massage Parlor in my absence] . Wrong! The company is the creation of Mike Burke. And a more fool-tolerant technician have I seldom known. I arrived (an hour late) to my appointment driving a cart with those heavy suckers, and Mr. Burke began instantly to retrieve the capstan-bound tape with a delicate electronic tape repair toolkit [along with rock and paper]. a pair of scissors. Turning his attention to the 1st unit, he had it diagnosed and maintained within 15 minutes, all along keeping me apprised of the potential effects and progress made, in a series of inclusive comments keeping me entirely engaged by his powers of observation, expression and execution, salting his discourse with anecdotes of other customers' reparations [ with which his store is stuffed and bulging. Fair notice - bring a chair.] To make a long story even longer, Mr. Burke fixed 2 of them on the spot, and too the other two under his wing, turning down my offer to give him the two unopened Betamaxes to sell, leaving me with an opportunity to sell them on Ebay for $1500 apiece.

One caveat: He did have the annoying habit of not turning his whole attention on me and my virtual cornucopia of suggestions and impressions, instead expressing himself in narratives competing with those of mine own. Can...

Horrible experience with Michael. My very first call with him was excellent. He was responsive, respectful and seemed very knowledheable. But it went down hill from there. After taking a few weeks to finally diagnose the problem with my vintage turntable, he would speak very unclearly about my options to proceed with a fix. And then he often was unresponsive to my outreach with questions on next steps. I would only receive responses after multiple follow-ups. That was frustrating but generally tolerable except that he was often somewhat condescending in his tone when he did respond. When we finally agreed on a solution to fix the turntable, he executed it but did not complete it to the fullest extent possible and was not transparent about the work he did. He provided only a superficial fix. I caught the issue accidentally and politely confronted him about it, after which he agreed to complete the fix in entirety. It was only a little more work. As time had gone on, he became directly rude and almost combative with me for no good reason. I had maintined a polite tone with him throughout. I felt like he was empowered to act rudely because he knew that I had no choice but to continue working with him - that was the worst part. I had chosen to work with Michael because of the excellent reviews I saw on Google. I'm still extremely surprised at how bad my experience was. I'm now continuing other repairs on same stereo system with ProTech in Silver Spring Maryland and I vouch that they are a fully professional company with excellent customer service. I strongly suggest using ProTech if they are within reasonable...

I've been a customer of Burke Electronics and Mike Burke for over 10 years. Mike has serviced a few of my electronic devices (tape decks, record player) and each time have had nothing but great experiences.

Recently I reached out to Mike about issues I was having with an old (30+yrs) 5-disc CD player where the CD tray was getting stuck. He came by my house to pick up the player, (which was awesome!), explained the mechanisms that could be contributing to the problem and suggested that cleaning would help as well. I paid his service fee and in about a week or so, Mike delivered the player back and explained what he did to repair it (new parts and cleaning). Unfortunately when I tried using the player that night the CD tray was still getting stuck. Because of the holidays coming up, I decided to take the the CD player to his shop; Mike was apologetic but upfront that replacing parts again may not necessarily solve the problem and given its age, likely other problems were contributing to the issues. At that point I expected to get a refund of the service fee. Instead he surprised me by giving me one of his own CD players he had at his shop! I really appreciated it. I don't know of any technician who would willingly give away his equipment like that. Mike is genuine old school and extremely talented. Sometimes things don't' work out, and we should be forgiving. In turn he demonstrated that he values me as a customer. I look forward to continuing to go to him for all of my electronic...