The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I agree Brian 100%. The quality of the cabinets were some of the best, i agree with you on the sound quality. But any reproducer that has a mica and a stiff needle bar isnt going to give you the best sound. The gimick with Sonora of the wooden tone arm was supposed to give you a more warm sound. Myself with mine, it sounds ok, but its no Credenza either
And i rebuilt all my reproducers on all my machines acept the Victor Brass Ortho's i have. I have mine sitting in the music room, to me mine is more show piece and novelty, people come over they like the light in it, wooden tone arm, carvings Ect.. But its a machine i dont play very often just a conversation piece realy

... and it's really unfortunate, too, the sound quality. I've had five or six sonoras over the years, still have one (a rosary model), and used to have one of the larger bombe style machines... they're so easy on the eyes, but they always wound up somewhere in a corner of the room or behind other (less visually interesting) machines because I just never played them that often. I actually remember finding the bombe model at a nearby auction, getting really excited about it, the drama of the auction itself, the waiting and thinking I wasn't going to get it... then, when I won it, the ridiculously obsessive care I took in transporting it to my house at the time, the special spot it got in the living room... then discovering - ugh - that a spring was broken (this was an early acquisition for me, and the first broken spring I'd dealt with)... so I disassembled the motor and sent the barrel out for repair, and while waiting, I worked on everything else, including the cabinet, the reproducer, etc. finally a few weeks later it was all finished, the spring barrel came back, I reassambled the motor, got everything together, opened a beer and put on a record only to be amazed - literally - at how low the volume seemed compared to the victor VV-80 I'd primarily been using all the time. the situation was even more anti-climactic than this post. frustrated, I remember parking in front of the television for the next few hours.

i hope you had another beer after all that

I have an itsy Sonora console - so small that I carried it myself from the car & up to the 2nd floor (well, 20 years ago - probably couldn't do that today!) . Tiny though it is, it produces such volume that staying in the same room can be ear-splitting.

brianu wrote:the term off-brand isn't being used pejoratively or even subjectively for that matter to describe the relative aesthetic or mechanical worth of a given machine. as explained above, it's simply referring not only to the smaller, non-major ("big three") US manufacturers (victor, edison and columbia... or abroad, hmv and Pathé, I'd imagine), but also to the companies, like sonora, that were simply smaller players in the business as a whole, in that they managed a much smaller phonograph market share because the primary production interests were elsewhere (furniture, pianos, etc.), and tended to use parts, components, cabinets and such produced by outfits other than themselves. a company like victor did everything in-house, an off-brand - albeit better-known off-brand - like sonora did not. that they are an off-brand, however, hardly diminishes the quality of their machines, though... well, the sound quality on most isn't the best, but the company used some of the better crafted cabinets and solid motors, and rarely if ever used pot metal for anything.

Precisely!
I get the feeling, when some people hear the words "off-brand", they think of off milk or rotten eggs
But the term "off-brand" has absolutely NOTHING to do with machine build or sound quality. In fact, some of these off-brand companies built the very best cabinets & components in the world.
Some of the highest quality cabinets I've seen have carried brand names that no-ones ever heard of, or didn't carry and brand name at all. They were often made by small firms who specialized in making the finest quality furniture, and they used expensive solid timbers or rare exotic veneers for exquisite inlays. Cabinets that mass production & mass producers couldn't even come close to achieving.
Some of the best quality motors were made by off-brand manufacturers like Collaro & Garrard. What is largely considered by most collectors as the very best spring motor ever produced was the Garrard Super Motor, which was a fully enclosed motor with an oil sump & it pumped oil to the springs & every bearing, every time you wound the machine & it ran silent. Yet Garrard is an off-brand company.
Another off-brand company built the very best sounding acoustic machines produced anywhere in the world...EMG. They often also used the very best motors available & cabinetry equal to, or better than what the big 3 were producing, yet they are an off-brand company.
So please dont automatically thing the term off-brand means bodgy cabinets & dodgy motor, because is simply isn't so.
It is no doubt a collectors term that probably originated in the 1960s, (it was certainly in common use in the late 70s when I started collecting), and it is used to refer to ANY brand of machine not made by Edison, Columbia & Victor/HMV.
The one & only company that truly doesn't deserve to be labeled as an off-brand manufacturer is Pathé, but it is anyway.

When I think of "off-brand" machines, I think of a machine made up exclusively from stock parts available to any maker. Parts like stock tone-arm, sound box, motor, etc. It seems to me, although Sonora used a purchased motor, they crafted their own design tone-arm, and horn, designed their own cabinets, and otherwise distinguished themselves apart from the budget off-brands. Sonora was for sure not a cheap "off brand". It seems to be they attempted to establish a particular design that would say "Sonora" just as Victor units are clearly Victor.

Well, it seems that what makes an "off brand" is a matter of opinion. I never thought it had much to do with quality, but with exposure. Sonora phonographs are well known, were fairly popular when new, and had a national (rather than local) appeal, similar to Silvertone.

To go by the rules laid out in these posts. I would have to consider Brunswick as being an off brand too, and they were the 3rd largest phonograph company around, for a while anyway. That's why I'd consider these as "lesser brands". They were a big deal, but not as big as the so called "big three".

Phototone wrote:When I think of "off-brand" machines, I think of a machine made up exclusively from stock parts available to any maker.

Then perhaps it's time to change your thinking

bbphonoguy wrote:Well, it seems that what makes an "off brand" is a matter of opinion. I never thought it had much to do with quality, but with exposure. Sonora phonographs are well known, were fairly popular when new, and had a national (rather than local) appeal, similar to Silvertone.

To go by the rules laid out in these posts. I would have to consider Brunswick as being an off brand too, and they were the 3rd largest phonograph company around, for a while anyway. That's why I'd consider these as "lesser brands". They were a big deal, but not as big as the so called "big three".

Well, if you want to invent a new term for "lesser brands" there's nothing stopping you, but in it's original context, ANYTHING EXCEPT Edison, Columbia & Victor/HMV (incorporating pre 1901 Victor & pre 1897 Gramophone Co Berliner machines) were called off-brand machines.
These were the only brands of machine that original collectors would touch, right up into the mid 1970s, and even then it was only external horn models that were considered collectible. Everything else was considered worthless junk.
In 1969, if a collector bought a Brunswick, Sonora, Chenney, Rexonola, Paillard, Thorens, Academy, Gilbert, or Vocalion, they would have been laughed at for wasting money on an "off-brand" machine, even though all these companies were well known & had plenty of both national & internation exposure.

My definition of off-brand is any machine that was made after WWI and before the Depression that wasn't very large. Brands that were sold in dept. stores like Montgomery Ward and Sears under their names were not really off-brands, and brands like Sonora, Pathé, Kimball, Brunswick even, fall into a 2nd Tier category, where they're very common and enjoyed national distribution, but aren't seen as often as Edison, Victor, or Columbia players. True "off-brands" include my Champion Graphaphone, the Shell-O-Phone, Supreme, Cheney, Starr, etc.

Well, that's my $0.02.