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Acadmy Nippy

Did Columbia buy Academy assets ? and was the Academy Nippy a forerunner of the Columbia 100 ? Same tone arm assembly , metal motor board but wooden box

Academy gramophones were produced by the Johnson Talking Machine Company of Liverpool, which had no connection with Eldridge R. Johnson of Victor.

Academy was taken over by Columbia in about 1929/30, after which their machines acquired such Columbia features as the Plano-Reflex tonearm.

As to which came first, the Academy Nippy or the Columbia 100 "Cadet", I do not know.

epigramophone wrote:Academy gramophones were produced by the Johnson Talking Machine Company of Liverpool, which had no connection with Eldridge R. Johnson of Victor.

Academy was taken over by Columbia in about 1929/30, after which their machines acquired such Columbia features as the Plano-Reflex tonearm.

As to which came first, the Academy Nippy or the Columbia 100 "Cadet", I do not know.

Thanks for that I'm sure the Columbia 100 came after the Nippy I have used Nippy tonearms to repair Columbia 100s in the past

I likewise do not know when the Nippy was introduced, but the 100 appeared in 1930. I think it came first, or perhaps at about the same time; the Nippy is too obviously a cut price version of it to be otherwise. In particular, the Nippy soundbox is obviously a cheap version of the Columbia 15B, itself a cheaper version of the 15A. It has the same stylus bar and diaphragm, in a one-piece pot-metal front and bezel, with a pot metal backplate exactly the same (apart from name) as that of the 15B. It suffers the usual pot metal problems and is often missing.
I will attempt to post a couple of photos of one.