The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I was listening to records on the Univ of Calif Santa Barbra site http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/cylinderhome.png on my iPad when on a whim I pressed the rubber tube on the end of my cygnet horn up to the speaker on my iPad. Suddenly I could afford to "play on my triumph" all the titles I can't afford!

Got me to thinking: I think I remember someone here or somewhere on the interweb describing how they put a wireless bluetooth speaker into a horn...

And I came across this post...

atopolosky wrote:BUMP - FADA Tone Arm Unit No. 193 A - don't know much about this, but it looks interesting! $8 Shipping
Allan

But has anyone here used pieces of a reproducer but perhaps replaced the diaphragm with a small speaker? Or other ideas?

I'm really excited about using my iPad to trun my Triumph into a jukebox with a huge library... And I want to make it as discreet as possible...

A couple of related threads
Here and Here

This is my Bluetooth speaker adapter for an orthophonic Victor machine. I also have one for the older Victors. This idea could easily be used for an Edison horn with a little modification to the adapter. It runs for about 1.5 hours on Bluetooth mode or for several hours when used with an AUX cable.

The adapter is a modified PVC plumbing cap with a Sitko orthophonic isolator and a cheapo bluetooth speaker from Fry's.

I have a very heavy, multi-ohm, much-abused bakelite-bodied Utah (or maybe University, I forget now) driver connected to a badly flaking oak-painted Cygnet horn - but it sounds great! It's in combo with a speaker system my Grandfather built in the early 50s, which contains 2 15" "Knight" (made by Electro-Voice) woofers with treble horns. My turntable needs a new flipover stylus, so I've heard these speakers only with radio, for several years. But it's a good way to use a spare cygnet horn!

I found a Lewis Phono-Consonator on eBay some years ago and made up a simple test rig to play tones of various frequencies through the thing to see if it made any difference to the sound produced. Basically the system was to use a tone generator played through both conical and petal horns and then measuring the output level with a dB meter. Part of this was the sound source, a 50mm speaker fixed in a bit of plastic pipe:

http://1drv.ms/1MnVRxm
http://1drv.ms/1MnVXVG

The results of the test were at best subjective, suggesting that the business of selling 'must have' hifi add-ons is a far from recent activity, but the sound produced when I played a simple Ipod through the horn were simply amazing. Of course I have heard folded horn speakers and so on but I would have never believed such quality could be had from a 50mm cone behind a big Edison horn. Which reminds me - I must dig out those old articles on horn cone propagation...

Keith

Thanks everybody!!

(Retrograde, I think those are the posts I was trying to remember, sorry for starting a new thread!)

(I noticed, except for a "MKII"? video linked by RefSeries, that the examples were [mostly] Victor. For Christmas, I plan to have something rigged so it looks like my Triumph is playing song after song with no winding, no cylinder changing, and best yet a library I could never afford!)

Thanks again for all the great replies!

-Michael

Schlick wrote:I was listening to records on the Univ of Calif Santa Barbra site http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/cylinderhome.png on my iPad when on a whim I pressed the rubber tube on the end of my cygnet horn up to the speaker on my iPad. Suddenly I could afford to "play on my triumph" all the titles I can't afford!

Got me to thinking: I think I remember someone here or somewhere on the interweb describing how they put a wireless bluetooth speaker into a horn...

And I came across this post...

atopolosky wrote:BUMP - FADA Tone Arm Unit No. 193 A - don't know much about this, but it looks interesting! $8 Shipping
Allan

But has anyone here used pieces of a reproducer but perhaps replaced the diaphragm with a small speaker? Or other ideas?

I'm really excited about using my iPad to trun my Triumph into a jukebox with a huge library... And I want to make it as discreet as possible...

Yes. It's called a Magnavox Telemegaphone. The earliest examples use left-over Edison Cygnet horns. Even into the 1920's the large Magnavox horns used a modified Edison style coupling between the bell and the goose-neck.

My Ver 1.0 so far...
or or
Like I could afford that record!
(Didn't know which format to post. [Are videos files allowed?])