Any vintage audiophiles here?...

[BattlestarGalactic]

Very cool stuff Doug!

[WConley]

Barry - That is a beautiful piece of art!  Love it 

[Barry_R]

Doug - can't tell from the pics - but does your record player allow you to rotate the diaphragm?  My Sonora has that feature, so that you can play both vertical and lateral cut (Edison) records.  That Atwater-Kent is really cool - I use the Zenith for ball games as well.

I have a couple friends who are really into vintage radio (one of them has a complete Scott with cabinet).  I just loved the appearance and vibe of the old stuff and allowed them to guide me on the pieces I have.  I would see something I liked and would call them asking "is this good or junk" and we'd take it from there.  Like the cars, I have tried to reduce the amount of projects I have sitting around.

[shady]

This is the only black face Zenith I have.

[Heo]

When you just dont bought a Radio it was a furniture
I have a couple of friends that was in to Jukeboxes
in the 80s one of them still have his i think i can
get some pics if you are interested think they span
from 40s to late 50s one had like a radar on top of it
Dad have a handcranked gramophone with a funnel
or what you call it for the sound

When i was a kid we all had mopeds and we all tried
to get more speed out of them. Any way a friends
grandmother had a gramaphone like that in the atics so he cut
of the "funnel" with a hacksaw. And we installed it
on his moped with a hose to the carb facing forward
like a combined velocitystack/scoop we imagined a
radical higher topspeed. End result i remember was.
He run over the funnel with his rear wheel crasched
bent the footpeg, being scolded by his parents for scraping
up the knees on his new school pants and wrecking grannys
gramophone

[cjshaker]

Barry, no it does not have that function. I wasn't even aware they made them like that, so that's pretty neat. I do have an old phonograph that plays the wax Edison scrolls, but it's missing the megaphone and I have not been able to locate one for it. I can't remember the name of it offhand though. It's actually a small portable unit in a small wooden carry case, apparently for traveling people who just couldn't go without their music.

My Dad has an old player piano with a couple dozen scrolls for it. It used to work when I was a kid, but the bellows have since deteriorated and won't push air anymore. He went to DeVry Institute in the early '50s, then opened up a small TV and radio repair shop and ran that until he got into the Lima Ford plant in '59, so I grew up around this stuff.

That Atwater Kent is really a remarkable radio. My Dad found it in a junkyard one day when he used to take me with him all the time. While I re-stained the cabinet, he fixed it, built a homemade power supply for it and gave it to me. I used to listen to it incessantly when I was young. I had an antenna that stretched outside my bedroom and across 4 trees, about 50 yards in total length (antenna design back then was an art form in itself). I have a list of about 30 broadcast stations that I managed to come up with after hours and hours of messing with it back then. Trying to find stations using 3 tuning knobs, when there is no guide to find them, is an exercise in patience..lol But I could and still can get stations up to a thousand miles away on a good night.

[Barry_R]

Wax cylinders are a whole 'nuther deal.

Early records were not yet a defined art.  Edison wanted to replicate his cylinder's technology, so the data on the grooves in Edison records was cut "up & down".  Others (RCA) went to a design where the data was cut laterally in "side to side".  Probably got around Edison patents.  The lateral design was far more durable and remains the standard today.

[cjshaker]

Ahh, I got it now. That's something that I had forgotten all about. I had to look at it closer. I can rotate the needle/diaphragm assy. and I can rotate the outer 1/3 part of the tone arm. Are those the adjustments you're talking about? I'm gonna have to research that a bit more because that's something I've never read up on.

[cleandan]

An audiophile? Yes.
Vintage? Yes.
Just not quite as vintage as the stuff you are showing.

While I do have a late 1940's ARVIN 481 TFM desktop AM/FM radio...in mahogony bakelite, most of my stuff is 1970's vintage.

My garage system consists of McIntosh gear.
C32 preamp.
MC2125 amp.
MR75 tuner. All hooked up to Klipsch Heresy speakers.

I also have a Marantz 2270 receiver that gets hauled around as my "portable" system.
For instance, when our local drive in theater played its last show I used two car batteries and an inverter to power the Marantz and some Heresy's so we had great sound for the movie Grease.