Last Saturday I went to a garage sale and saw this beat up old HiFi cabinet from the late 50's just sitting in this guys lawn with a "free" sign on it. I had to have it. So I pick it up and take it home, and take a look in the back. It's a complete mess, it looks like a dozen or so animals had once inhabited it and don't even get me started on the amount of spiders that crawled out of it. Once it was all clean it actually didn't look to bad, and to my surprise all the tubes were still intact. I started turning knobs on the tuner and it changed stations fine. So I decided to plug it in with a fire extinguisher on hand. And, it worked to my amazement, the pots were in need of cleaning, and the motor on the built in record player made strange sounds if I turned it to 45 rpm, but it worked. I cleaned some of the pots and tuned it to my favorite local radio station, it was one of the best sounding things I had ever heard, there was almost zero distortion even when you turned the volume all the way up. The bass rocks the house and the treble is crystal clear. All this out of a free junk cabinet. I suppose I should tell you what it is, its a RCA Victor "New Orthophonic High Fidelity" and what I think is the 1957 model, I was only able to find one other like it online here and the sound coming from his player is a pretty good representation of mine. Has anyone else seen this console before or does anyone want to share a story or specs of their old consoles? I'd be very interested in it as any vintage audio gear peaks my interest.
I would also like to note that mine comes with a tuner and that I have found a few other people with the console, just not much info about them, and the other ones I found do not have a tuner.
You ever check out Techmoan on youtube? he has a lot of old hifi stuff
That was a quick subscribe.
My Dad was a NYC jazz musician in the 1950's. He had this gigantic piece of German Telefunken furniture Hi-Fi. The radio sorta looked like this but darker, rounder and bigger.
It was elaborately carved and the record player was in a cabinet underneath with storage on either side with the records under the turntable. There were doors to hide the turntable. The second piece on top of the countertop was the radio. There whole cabinet was 6 feet tall, behind the radio was a mirror and there were carved legs in front to hold up the crown molding shelf. The radio had about a dozen bands like shortwave and stuff. I remember trying to see how far I could listen to and I got to Argentina. It sounded awesome, but us kids were not allowed to touch it.
The coolest thing for me is it had what I just learned is called the "Magic Eye" tuning system. I guess it was a kind of exposed tube that showed when one had the knob exactly focused on a stations frequency.
This was my video game in the 1970's.
Side Note: Back then I always wondered how The Beatles were able to play live on the radio 4 times an hour.
That must really be hard work and the station must be pretty crowded with all those bands there!
Thats awesome, I've seen the magic eye tuning before but never knew what it was.