RCA Victor RAE-84 found

[SteveinAlaska]

In the course of "googling" for info on this I found a link to this site about the same machine, so I am assuming this is antique enough to post.As I only had a photo to work with,it looks to be the same model(RCA Victor RAE-84). It appears that there are members on site that have experience with these machines, so would like to know what I might run into in the course of repair/restoration.

Found this machine listed (but it is in the Anchorage area)so it's gonna be a road trip to retrieve it...in the winter, in Alaska where the temps tonite will down to -30F

The final note to the story, I had the privilege of transferring to CD some Victor Home recordings from a pioneer aviator and this may be the recorder/player used in 1931-32.

[gregbogantz]

Hi Steve, I have an RAE-84 and have restored it. This was RCA's top dog model in 1932 and it has every bell and whistle that RCA knew how to put into a consumer product back then. Consequently, there's a lotta stuff to get right when you restore it. It has the third type of RCA record changer that uses the continuous play, recycling swinging record magazine. It has the 33-⅓ rpm speed option that supports RCA's introduction of that speed to the consumer market (WAY ahead of Columbia in 1948). It has the home recording feature, with the source selectable from the radio or from the furnished microphone. And it has a "VU" recording level meter - pretty neat seeing this on a 1932 model machine. The several operational selections are made by means of the "transfer switch" which is thing of wonder to behold - and to fix. It's a HUGE drum switch assembly that almost always needs some type of mechanical restoration.

There's lots to know about this machine, but the power amp is one of the trickiest parts. It uses a pair of #46 tubes in class B operation. This use of class B was an early attempt to get more power out of early style triode output tubes. The #46 was a very early power tetrode designed specifically for class B operation. Several other companies tried this in 1932, including Atwater-Kent and Zenith. What the audio engineers found out was that class B sounds terrible - it is full of "crossover" distortion that cannot be eliminated because it is inherent in class B theory. So it's difficult to get these amplifiers to sound really good. The radio industry figured out this limitation and dropped class B like a hot potato within two years. But you CAN make the RAE-84 sound acceptable with enough twiddling of the power amp.

Otherwise, the set is significant from an engineering point of view: The radio is a very sensitive superhet with the inclusion of a "squelch" circuit to reduce interstation noise when tuning - one of the first such sets to have this feature. And the cabinet is one of the first designs to deal with the issue of bass boominess. It does this with the inclusion of acoustically-tuned resonant cavities built into the cabinet that are meant to cancel out some of the cabinet boominess and smooth out the bass response. This was very cutting-edge acoustical engineering for the day. RCA and others developed further acoustical treatments during the mid-1930s to address this problem, including the "acoustic clarifiers" which were drone-cone speaker assemblies employed by Philco, the "acoustic labyrinth" speaker enclosure used by Stromberg-Carlson, and RCA who used tuned ducted ports in some of their cabinets.

So, if you're feeling adventuresome and want to challenge yourself to some grunt and grind, by all means pick up this RAE-84 and dig into it. It's an unusual and somewhat rare model that deserves being restored by somebody. It's really a neat machine and quite a good show-and-tell piece to have as a leader in your collection. Attached are two pictures of my RAE-84.

[Ampico66]

I'm just glad someone else appreciates 1920s and early 1930s electric phonographs like me. Few people seem to really get into them!