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DO PICKFORDS REALLY MOVE GRAMOPHONE HORNS?

Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2019 11:18 am
by old country chemist
Here is another hot off the pencil. There must be a better caption to this one-perhaps one or two of you on the Fprum can suggest something better...?

Re: DO PICKFORDS REALLY MOVE GRAMOPHONE HORNS?

Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2019 12:14 pm
by Orchorsol
Once again utterly superb Alastair.

It reminds me of the old EMG comment regarding the Oversize, along the lines of "Should have placed the horn in the field before building the mansion around it!".

Re: DO PICKFORDS REALLY MOVE GRAMOPHONE HORNS? --- Giant hor

Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2019 6:11 pm
by Inigo
Nice and funny!
... Wasn't him Edison who built a recording horn the size of a room in one of the buildings at West orange? It rings a bell.. In the other hand, one of my plans to build a huge exponential horn is to use the walls and ceiling of a corner any room, and just add boards closing the corner to form a variable cross section triangular horn from floor to near the ceiling. At a certain distance off the ceiling that must be calculated, the closing panels must end, pouring the pressure waves against the ceiling.
The final touch would be a triangle shaped board closing the ceiling and walls corner, acting as a reflector to pour the sound into the room. All angles must be carefully designed. It would be kind of a Plano-Reflex horn. The walls and ceiling would act as the end flare of the horn, throwing the sound into the room to the listeners.
The travelling up of the sound could be reverted down with a smaller reflector, then at the floor reverted back towards the ceiling, making a 6 meter folded horn, using two superposed layers of boards to make the conduits one inside another.
The Gramophone would be connected to the narrow end of the horn at the floor using a designed hose with a fast connector. The hose would be conveying the sound from the tonearm base into the narrow end of the horn.
I've made hand drawings and sketches for it.
Adding, say, a two meter distance from the last triangle reflector to the listener, and if the room is 2.5 meters high, and adding the length of hose + tonearm, say, 1.5 meters, a horn 6 meters long could be built in one run floor to ceiling. If we use the folding trick, 4 meters more could be added, making a 10 meter total length of sound conduit....!
Surely that horn could be designed to have a cut-frequency of 50 hz or maybe lower... Still I haven't done any calculations, but will do...
EDIT
Thinking about this long cherished project of the corner horn.. and thinking about the dimensions... Probably a single run floor to ceiling would be enough. 6 m of horn in total could be made to sound like an EMG probably...
Another trick for our spouses to tolerate that construction at home. Not a simple matter... :D would be that the horn boards could be easily concealed from view, constructing a corner bookshelf in front of it, the back board of the shelf being our horn conduit board, firmly and airtight sealed against the two walls. The reflector triangular board on the ceiling corner could be also embellished, all made in good quality varnished wood. Simply the ceiling reflector could be made to carry encastred lights, the electric ancillaries hidden behind the wood, the wiring discreetly fixed to the very corner of walls, not to disturb the air column.
I believe this is actually feasible, the sound could be very good, and the gramophone table with the hose could be transportable, put away when not in use.
I always imagine this gramophone made using a modified hmv101 as the turntable unit. :D

Re: DO PICKFORDS REALLY MOVE GRAMOPHONE HORNS?

Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2019 6:15 pm
by 52089
Inigo wrote:Nice and funny!
... Wasn't him Edison who built a recording horn the size of a room in one of the buildings at West orange? It rings a bell...
Edison did build a 125 foot long recording horn, but I don't think it made enough of a difference to continue using it.

The biggest horn was probably the "Auditorium" Victrola mentioned in Look for the Dog. I don't think any of those survice.

Re: DO PICKFORDS REALLY MOVE GRAMOPHONE HORNS?

Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2019 8:38 am
by OrthoSean
52089 wrote:The biggest horn was probably the "Auditorium" Victrola mentioned in Look for the Dog. I don't think any of those survice.
Actually one DOES survive and is being restored. Details escape me, but it's in the DC area at a former finishing school, Bob Baumbach did a story about it in the most recent issue of "The Antique Phonograph".

Sean

Re: DO PICKFORDS REALLY MOVE GRAMOPHONE HORNS?

Posted: Sat Oct 05, 2019 7:34 pm
by kirtley2012
Great!

If they do I may need to get in touch with them :lol: