The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Ladies and Gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure we present you here with images of my latest acquisition, a 1930-1940 soviet era russian portable gramphone, or as they woud say in Russia, a patefon. This little gem of a portable was manufactured in the proud city of Leningrad, by the wery prosaic sounding "Northern Steel Forming Factory" (best english translation for "Северный Пресс"), one of the five or six factories in the SSSR making portable gramophones. I believe that portable acoustic gramophones were manufactured in the SSSR well into the sixties. The gramophone is extremely sturdily built without any unnecessary embelishments or features. The speed control serves also as a brake, no needle storage provided and no significant hand finishing on the parts. Turntable 6" dia. The motor is a strong single spring, capable of playing at least two 8" records on one winding, some motor noise, but that could be me, since I took the whole thing apart to clean off the caked grime that was russian grease. The gears look like stamped brass without any machine finishing, had some un removed "factory" spurrs on them. The tone arm is very sturdy, supported by roller bearing at the upper end, wher it joins the support bracket/horn assembly, and moves very smoothly, without any effort. The horn is stamped steel that can rotate 180° around the tone arm swivel assembly. The soundbox looks like a straight forward Columbia copy, with three steel ball pivot assembly on both side of the independently adjustable pivot needles. It has an aluminum diapragm with a large spider and rubber gaskets. The back of the soundbox is made from bakelite and the front bezel from pot metal (my example has already bad cracks in it, that prevented me from fully rebuilding the soundbox).
BUT THIS THING IS LOUD, much louder than any portables I have heard! It plays without distortion or hiss. I will try to post videos when I figure out how to do it. I would love to know more about this machine. I do not read russian well enough to browse webpages, and english language info on these machine is very rare. The soviets copied a lot of portable gramophones: The Excelda is their Malyjutka, the larger ones are either a HMV 102 or Columbia clones.
I have never seen a non soviet portable like mine, I wander what machine might have given the idea for this design.

I think that particular horn configuration is a Russian original.

In the early 1990's I once played a rather pedestrian Columbia portable for a Russian couple who got quite a nostalgic charge from it. They said that even in the 1960's a machine like that would have been desirable. Even if you could get an electric machine the power supply wasn't dependable.

That Russian...errr...Soviet talking machine is a cutie. We included a photo of a red one in A World of Antique Phonographs as shown below. Thanks for showing it next to the 2-60 to demonstrate its petite proportions. Unfortunately, we couldn't find any substantive information on it either (at least not written in English), so the caption consists of the pap we occasionally substituted for scholarship!

But they are very cute little machines. I love the horn.

George P.

That's a pristine example of a Soviet portable. I had a chance of buying one
a while back but it was rough so I passed. Nice find!

Here is my Russian clone HMV102 alongside the real thing.

The clone looks superficially similar, but almost every measurement is different. It feels less solidly built than the HMV, yet both machines weigh about the same. For sound quality the HMV wins hands down.

The inscription inside the lid of the clone translates as "Pathéphone Factory, Molotov". I am told that in Russia "Pathéphone" is a generic term for what we in the UK would call a gramophone.