The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

All the off-brand machines sound anywhere from ok up to pretty good, after the soundbox is rebuilt.

I like to pick on Cheney because of the stairstep air passage, which is just exactly wrong - puts lots of hard edges in the path of the sound waves. And of course the claim that the wood of the horn would age and mellow the tone, like the finest Stradivarius, has not panned out...yet.

Starrs are nice if the original lovely piano finish is intact. Lose the grill cloth so you can see the beautiful birch veneer horn, too.

PeterF wrote:All the off-brand machines sound anywhere from ok up to pretty good, after the soundbox is rebuilt.

I like to pick on Cheney because of the stairstep air passage, which is just exactly wrong - puts lots of hard edges in the path of the sound waves. And of course the claim that the wood of the horn would age and mellow the tone, like the finest Stradivarius, has not panned out...yet.

Starrs are nice if the original lovely piano finish is intact. Lose the grill cloth so you can see the beautiful birch veneer horn, too.

I'm wondering, though, what it might have sounded like if the original gutta-percha diaphragm had held up, and was as flexible today as it originally was--with it's natural sound dampening qualities still intact.

I base this on what I was told, some 30 years ago, by Bob Waltrip. He said that the "horn" used by Cheney was not designed to function as a conventional horn, but as a floating resonator, vibrating in sympathy with the gutta-percha, in essence, becoming a diaphragm in and of itself.

I recall that he said that he was trying to come up with a suitable replacement for the gutta-percha, and had tried thin Styrofoam--the type used in meat packaging--but found that it worked better as a replacement for an Edison DD diaphragm.

I've often though that using Bob's "floating diaphragm" repair technique--that of suspending the Cheney diaphragm between two beads of silicone calk--might be worth a try.

As to how much the "resonator" actually vibrates when a record is played, I don't know since I've never owned a Cheney.

OrthoFan

Funny how we can sometimes trace information back to the same source! Much of my own opinion on Cheney comes from Bob as well, mostly during the struggles he had as he tried to make one sound good and finally after having given up in frustration. He was doing it on behalf of our common friend RJ Wakeman. I have a Cheney, which is pretty, but has never been inside from our garage in the decade or two that I've had it!

eighteenbelow wrote:Thanks, everyone. I've never owned a Cheney, so it's interesting to hear people's opinions about how they sound. What do you think of Starr phonographs? In your opinion, do they sound better or worse than Cheneys?

Starr was an average sounding brand, but they had some exceptionally well made cabinets.