The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Interesting little kit, have not seen anything like this.

"SPEAKEASIE HOME RECORDER C.1930"

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0118449840

Rather interesting and more complex than most- it has a grooved feed disc that guides the cutter over a metal blank. The usually encountered stuff (Echo, Kodisc: "Photograph your voice") uses a pre-grooved disc and requires you to shout into the phonograph horn.

I can't imagine that the quality of the sound would be very good as you would have to really shout to get much to register on the aluminium disk. THis said, professionally recorded aluminium disks are capable of surprisingly good reproduction. You just have to make sure that no steel or tungsone needles go anywhere near them. It will be interesting to see how high this one goes.

RJ

From what I've been told these systems weren't bad recording the spoken word and were good for audio greetings and the like- playing them back with a fibre needle helped. They were probably useless for music recording.

Wow, this went for UK £82! Now thats a lot for this I would have thought. Obviously a number of people really wanted it

RJ