The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Yep, sorta.

I wanna hear the sound come out of my best phono, my VE8-35x with it's 9 foot long folded up exponential horn.

Now that I think about the sound level that comes out of a reproducer just by itself, I'd guess the closest thing would be a tweeter with aluminum foil cone.

Hoping it would not filter out bass frequencies.

Thinking also that I could just form some jb-weld to hold a tweeter airtight in place.

If I formed up enough jb-weld, I could fasion a cone to the tone arm. Make a solid airtight grip on the tweeter speaker and pull it off the tone arm before it sticks solid.

Maybe a small plastic funnel could help.

RJ

One way to do what you want is to track down one of the old devices that were made to attach to the tone arm, which replaced the sound box with a driver but attached to the arm in the same manner the sound box did.

Trying to rig something with a modern tweeter and a funnel will disappoint and frustrate you. And I think trying to kluge something from a modern horn driver would be dicey too.

Some drivers are made more for midrange reproduction, others strictly for high frequencies. Especially with the latter, trying to get any bass response out of one (presuming it's mounted onto a horn with a sufficiently long air column to reproduce any low end) is not really going to work, as the amplitude needed for any bass output will be much more than the diaphragm is designed to travel. Bass at anything below a VERY low level will result in a trashed diaphragm.

However, I know of a driver which was indeed designed for full-range reproduction: the Western Electric 555W. This unit was designed and made back in the mid-late 1920s for talkies, and (when mounted on the proper horn) has a frequency response of 80-10000 Hz--the widest response of any horn driver ever made. It won't be the easiest thing to find, but I would think it interesting to hear one of these mated to a full-size Orthophonic horn....

I have done what you describe above, and enjoy demonstrating it for friends. I use an old transistor radio with an earphone jack, and connect it to one of the many types of radio adaptors that were made in the 1920s. I have several of the adaptors, but the one I enjoy most is the Dulce-Tone. This is the one that does not require you to remove the sound box - it works by vibrating the needle.

You can not connect the adaptor directly to the radio. You need to get a small audio transformer from an old 1930s vintage radio and build a simple box with the transformer inside and the in-and-out connectors. A radio collector friend helped me with this, and building the interface is a 30 minute job.

It works very well, especially on an Orthophonic. The adaptors appear on ebay regularly, and my friend sold me the transformer for a couple of bucks.