The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Noob question.

There is a door with a wooden grill that covers the horn mouth in the front of my Aeolian Vocalian gramophone. The door opens out and downward if one wants the full unobstructed volume from the horn.

There are tatters of original grill fabric left behind the wooden grill - it matches the colour of the grill cloth in Aeolian's period colour ads. If I had to guess, I would say the fabric is a light weight silk. It is now very fragile. It is not at all like the modern speaker grill cloth on my stereo gear and guitar amplifiers. This modern grill cloth is heavy, rough, and loosely woven. It is there to protect the speakers and to be as acoustically transparent as possible. The Aeolian grill cloth by comparison has very, very fine threads and is very, very tightly woven. It does not seem designed for acoustic transparency. I am wondering if the purpose of the cloth is as a mild volume damper, the door, closed and open, offering two basic volume ranges with gradations of volume within these ranges offered by the proprietary Graduola, the variable horn choke.

I would like to replace the cloth. I am wondering if I should look for a piece of silk in the same colour range or look for speaker grill cloth.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Thanks.

Generally, I think grille cloth was an aesthetic choice, to hide the horn. Some early Diamond Disc and Amberola machines had painted horns, and lacked grille cloth; others preferred to conceal the mechanism. In old acoustic machines, a thin, relatively sound-transparent silk material was used. it might have had a slight filtering effect, though; so the hinged grille on the A-V would be an option for those who wanted the fullest volume from their machine.

- Bill

Thank you for the reply.