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Thought I’d introduce myself and share a fun project that some of you may find useful. My gramophone adventure started with a VV-90 Victrola from the New York flea market that used to be held in a parking lot at 26th Street in Manhattan. Though mechanically all there, it was in aesthetically dreadful condition; at some point in its life someone thought it would be fun to paint it canary yellow.
I’m looking at you, hippies.
A subsequent owner tried to strip it but didn’t have the patience to chase the paint out of all the many little joints and bits of beadwork. It had also fallen forward at some point and the elegant Queen Anne/Art Nouveau stiles on the front of the carcass had split off. I did the best I could to get it looking half decent, and to the uninitiated it just looks like a cool old functioning Victrola. And it is, though doubtless it doesn’t hold a candle to many collectors’ nice examples.
As anyone who remembers the first time they heard a Victrola knows, the sound was really pleasing. It’s not high fidelity, it’s a different type of fidelity: on some vocal passages you’d swear there’s someone hiding in the damn talking machine and actually speaking through a megaphone, curious phenomenon best captured by the painting of Nipper (“His [dead] Master’s Voice”). Then there’s the novelty of being able to crank it up and play records for guests. My daughter gets a real kick out of playing old jazz disks and improvising her version of the Charleston. I pick up old 78s here and there. But there’s only so much Enrico Caruso a body can take, and collectors have snapped up a lot of the great old disks. On the other hand, I have a pretty big collection of old jazz on CDs, and recently discovered Spotify, an online music service that allows you to call up a very wide variety of just about anything that’s been digitized . . . you see where this is going?
So I decided to expand my Victrola library by making a reproducer that incorporates a small loudspeaker. Don’t laugh! I’m sure many of you know there’s a precedent for this. When the radio craze hit, a few manufacturers made a can-type headphone speaker you could use to pipe in radio transmissions through your gramophone. But these seem rare, were probably weak, and I’m cheap so rather than surf ebay for an eon, mess with matching transformers, and risk burning out really old windings, I decided to make The Magical Victrola Music Library Expander.
I modified a ¾” pipe flange to attach to the tone arm, and attached an 8-ohm full-range speaker (unfortunately no longer available). Coupled with an MP3 player and a little amplifier, it works! Now I can listen to just about any jazz recording that’s readily available. It could use a little refinement; at points it is a bit boomy, resonant, and muddy, but it’s operating under similar conditions and constraints as a regular reproducer, and exhibits similar limitations. If anyone’s interested I could go into details about the construction.
