Real or not?

[oldtvsandtoys]

who do you think is this one real?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... TQ:US:1123

[Valecnik]

No, it's an aged crapophone.

[Bruce_Van_Note]

Quite unreal.

[Jerry B.]

Pure junk. I don't mean to be critical and I'm happy to answer questions to the best of my ability, but this is a good reason to have a basic library of phono books. I don't want a less experienced collector to get burned on fakes and drop out of the hobby because of a poor experience. Also, I hate to see a crapophone in an antique shop because they will have a bad experience. When I started collecting back in the seventies, there were not many good books on the subject but there were virtually no fakes to buy. I might have overspent on a machine or two but I was not faced with the fakes and junk that is available today. Today the learning curve can be very expensive and embarrassing. I write this with the best intentions. Jerry Blais

[STARR-OLA]

This is kinda awful,i saw a riptrola in a antique store 2 yrs back for 699.00 the owner paid 500.00 for it.i felt bad for him and the person who buys it.

[estott]

That appears to be a good motor- at least one decent machine died to make this.

[USlakeside]

Thats a Primaphone. Unless I am mistaken, those aren't all fakes. It has a weird horn, and an added HMV decal to the glass, but I think parts of that are from a real phonograph. Primaphone from Bombay. I know all crappophones seem to stem from India, but there must have been legitimate local makers during the early 20th century right?

[TinfoilPhono]

I know nothing about Primaphone but for sure, that one has a more professional horn elbow and tonearm than are normally seen on crapophones. It's probably a mishmash based on a real machine, as USLakeside says. Better than the average crapophone but still wildly overpriced, incomplete, and with questionable parts. The only thing to its credit is that it may have been made 80 or 90 years ago (or at least a fair part of it).

But this is not to dispute the gist of the comments others have made, especially Jerry B's. I started collecting in 1962 and we had very little information to go on. There were some collectors I could turn to for advice, but it was by snail mail so it took time. And even my mentors were mostly in the dark. But at least we didn't have fakes and rarely ran into cobbled-up messes. Today we have the advantage of tons of information literally at our (keyboard) fingertips, but there are tons of problematic machines around.

[gramophoneshane]

Primaphones were made by Thorens & were sent to Bombay complete with Primaphone decal. The cabinet on this example is original, but unfortunately it's been remotored. I'm not familiar with the current motor, so I dont think it's a Thorens, but if it is, then it's a much earlier motor than the machine itself (early to mid 1920s).
The dead give-away is where they've cut the cabinet (modern crapophone style) to accommodate the long winding pawl.
The back bracket, tonearm & elbow appear to be correct, although the pictures are too fuzzy to be certain. The soundbox would have been one of Thorens more common styles, but it would have had a Primaphone paper label behind the mica.
I've seen Primaphone horn machines that were made in the 60s/70s, but I don't think this is one of them, but again without better photos it's hard to be 100% sure.
Judging by the HMV decal on the glass, I'm guessing it's an original machine that lived a very hard life, and some dealer/faker remotored & tarted it up about 20 or 30 years ago.
It's a pity because once restored, many of these Thorens machines from the 10s & 20s can sound & perform just as good or better than Victor/HMV horn machines with an exhibition soundbox.