Let's Face the Music with a Rose Graphophone

[Philip]

Experience the thrill of a full orchestra right there in your living room. Magic? Not really. It's simply the brilliance of our experienced engineers that brings you the ultimate in sound reproduction. So let yourself be carried away by the brilliance of a Bach symphony from the comfort of your armchair, or perhaps you would sooner jive to King Oliver's band. Whatever your preference, it's all here for you.

The depicted graphophone is of a type manufactured in America round about 1905. This machine is designed to play shellac discs while others were meant to play cylinders. Both types featured an oak cabinet, brass motor, "sound-analysing reproducer" and a large flower horn.

The kit was designed and drawn by Buz Walker Teach, Sacramento, 1977. Scale unknown but the cabinet is about 8.5 cm square. Matching the multi-folded cabinet sides was a bit tricky, but otherwise no problems. Now where did I put those old 78's?

[Viator]

Beautiful! It really gives the scent of early 1900s.
Last year I bought the CD with early Japanese music, recorded on the cylinders and discs in the same time. Noise level is really annoying but the very idea of the perpetuating or immortalizing the voice must be shocking for our predecessors.

[Michael Mash]

Is that “In My Merry Oldsmobile” by Billy Murray and Walter Van Brunt I hear, emanating from that lovely flower horn?

[Thumb Dog]

Hi All,

And hi, Philip. Very fine work on your old phonograph. We Yanks used to call the horn a Morning Glory Horn after the flower. They were often solid brass or colorfully painted with, you guessed it, Morning Glories.

To save wear on the brittle records, you could substitute your steel needles with bamboo needles that would fit into your tone arm. I think the bamboo needles were, “fire-hardened.” My aunt had some very old records that were surprisingly thick and only recorded on one side. The back side had no label and was completely smooth.

A remarkable invention and a remarkable model, too. All the best.

Score and fold,

Thumb Dog

[Siwi]

Interesting you mention 'Bach symphony' (which would have been by JC Bach or CPE Bach, as Johann Sebastian didn't write symphonies in the sense we understand them, rather it just meant 'a short bit of instrumental music') as a major headache was getting longer pieces on to the limited playing time of a wax cylinder. This led to symphony movements and indeed most music being played incredibly fast just to make sure, as there were no second takes, or else the band having to stop at predetermined points to change the master cylinder it was being recorded on. I think complete Beethoven's fifth would require about ten cylinders and cost a fortune for the time. The invention of the 'record' was a massive game changer.

Another crazy feature of early recording was the need for any soloists to physically lean into the recording horn to help the weak unamplified sound make an impression on the wax master. There are some wierd photos of opera and music hall singers leaning into these huge horns.

[Philip]

Hello sound reproduction fans. Thank you very much for your comments and observations.

Regarding needles, if my maternal grandfather ran out of proper needles he would substitute a woodworker's panel pin. It worked well enough but heaven knows what it did to the record.

As an aside, I post a photo of a 10" 78rpm record I have in my collection which might be of interest here as it is not made of shellac or vinyl. It's made of a dense cardboard with a thin skin of plastic-type material on each side into which the grooves were cut. Unbreakable? Hmmm... It's only flexible to a point. I doubt if it is still playable as the skins have become crazed over time.

[Don Boose]

Excellent model, Philip.

In the 1940s, my aunt and uncle had a similar (though somewhat less elegant) device that they called a gramophone and on which they played their collection of 78 rpm records.

Two of the pieces they played were "The Anniversary Walz" and the "Blue Skirt Walz," which I had always thought were operetta tunes dating from the time the old machine had been built, but in preparing this post, I discovered they were actually fairly new songs, having been written in 1941 and 1944, respectively.

Anyway, it is a beautiful model.

Don