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Turntables and radios

Paul's Posts — 31 August 2012

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Turntables and radios

Yesterday we gave a little history on the amazing invention of the “talking machine” that, for the first time in the history of mankind, allowed millions of people to enjoy music in their homes.  And not just any music, but the music of the masters of that day.  Imagine having the great Caruso singing for you whenever and wherever you wanted.  What an amazing invention.

Introduced in the latter part of the 1900′s, a decade later Gramophones and Victrolas were in over half of every home in the Western World so great was their popularity – but then the bottom starting falling out of the market as another invention came onto the scene – and this one was leaps and bounds cooler than the turntable: radio, introduced in the 1920′s.

Imagine for a moment growing up in this era where the primary mode of transportation was either riding animals or trains, indoor plumbing is a luxury, gas lamps and lanterns still provide much of the light in homes and all of a sudden there’s a machine that spews out music on command – followed in less than a decade by most cities getting electricity, telephones, electric lights, the introduction of the automobile coupled with the idea of mass production to build them and the end of the animal transportation era.  On top of all this add yet another even more magical and mysterious machine that plays music out of thin air!  What a wonderful time to experience such huge magical changes.

Between 1920 and 1924 radio usage in the United States, the UK and much of Europe went from zero to over 60% of every home having one.  Block parties were regular events and neighbors gathered for evening radio broadcasts of their favorite shows.  The bottom on turntable sales dropped from everything to nearly nothing in just 4 short years.  Both the Victrola (Gramophone) turntable and the radio were complete players unto themselves – the Gramophone 100% mechanical, the radio 100% electronic.

The Victrola company, faced with warehouses filled with unsold Gramophones made a momentous decision: they would combine forces with the folks at RCA and build a combination Gramophone and radio into one box.  Revolutionary in its scope, little attention by the public was paid to the fact that this radio/turntable combination of 1924 marked the first electronic turntable ever made – and from that point forward, all major turntables went from mechanical to amplified in the blink of an eye.

Turntables and radios

Separate radios and separate amplified turntables were still available but the biggest sellers of the day and, for the next several decades to come, remained the combo we now call a receiver which even today still consists of a radio, an amplifier, a preamplifier and a phono input.  Unlike the receivers of today, however, these console models included the tone arm and platter (now powered with an electric motor) to make a complete system.

It would take something really interesting to change people’s purchasing habits from this all-in-one console to true separates as we know it.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(5) Readers Comments

  1. Soundminded

    August 31, 2012 at 4:22 am

    The ultimate radio phonograph of the 1930s and 1940s may have been Capehart;

    http://www.myvintagetv.com/updatepages1/capehart/capehart.htm

  2. Soundminded

    August 31, 2012 at 12:32 pm

    There are at least two ways to judge these purchases. One way is to consider how much enjoyment and enrichment they brought into people’s lives. And that’s exactly what they did for countless tens of millions of Americans and many more millions around the world whether it was the fabulous Capehart, a more affordable Philco, Crossley, or Atwater Kent, or a simple table top unit.

    During the depths of the depression in the 1930s and during WWII in the 1940s the radio phonograph became a kind of electronic hearth, a place where family gathered during evenings after work and school to hear their favorite programs and listen to music and the news. There were no tape recorders so if you missed the latest episode of your favorite like Green Lantern, the Hornet, or Jack Benny you just wouldn’t ever expect to hear it again, a one time opportunity. With friends and at parties in people’s homes they listened to their favorite new recordings and danced to the music. Later when TV was added, they gathered to watch and many TV receivers were incorporated into early all in one entertainment centers especially during the 1960s.

    The other way to judge them is through their technological competence. Those old radio phonographs never promised anything more than a pleasing experience. But starting around 1939 with people like Avery Fisher, the concept of high fidelity was introduced with the expectation that one day the aural experience of hearing live music performed from recordings would be realized in a home. For awhile it seemed like there was progress in that direction and it would continue. Stereo was certainly almost universely accepted as an advancement over monophonic sound in that direction. But with the failure of quadraphonic sound in the 1970s the industry reverted back to two channel stereo and has been conservatively stuck in that mode for nearly 40 years. All of that would probably not matter although people like Gordon Holt wrote bitterly about his disappointment in not seeing real advances more than once were it not for at least two factors. One is the pretentiousness of manufacturers of so called high end equipment. In reality their gains if there have been any at all over those last 40+ years have been in total incremental, marginal. The other is the staggering prices for what is in reality rather ordinary technology the best of which is only marginally better than far cheaper alternatives including older equipment. There are probably many reasons for the decline of this industry but these factors certainly have to be among them. The modern audiophile has likely turned his living room into something that looks more like an electronics laboratory than a home, has to sit in the one spot where his enormous investment offers any advantage at all to just one person at a time, and is perpetually shopping for ever more expensive equipment certain that the holy grail lies just around the corner. Yeah, that and the tooth fairy.

    • Tom Devey

      August 31, 2012 at 1:15 pm

      I would suggest that the concept of fidelity was present in the 1920s with the advent of Victor’s Orthophonic reproducers, which were specifically intended to provide an enhanced listening experience over that of the regular internal horn Victrolas. Certainly radio manufacturers were trying to create the illusion of enhanced sound through advertising (not that much has changed in this regard over the decades), by Philco through its “balanced sound”, whatever that was supposed to mean, and by well known conductors making claims about the fidelity of a particular brand of radio. It wasn’t until the middle of the 1930s that actual “High Fidelity” sets were introduced, though relatively few were sold.

      Otherwise I would agree with your comments.

  3. Tom Devey

    August 31, 2012 at 1:02 pm

    Console radios incorporating a record player were still fairly rare until after the Second World War, and were usually found only in the more expensive, ‘higher end’ offerings. Beginning around 1937 many console radios had a phono input, which was an RCA connector, and later on this became a phono/television sound input. Prewar radios usually had several bands, including Police, and shortwave. The more expensive radios had the shortwave band expanded into several scales on the dial, through a technique known as bandspreading. Several manufacturers, such as General Electric, Stromberg-Carlson and Zenith incorporated FM reception based on the Armstrong System, using the band 42-50MHz.

    It is interesting to note that most of the postwar console radios did away with shortwave reception, nor, except for a few high end models, incorporate the new (88-108MHz) FM band. The radio component part of the majority of these ‘entertainment units’ were quite standard AM broadcast receivers designed without any of the flair exhibited by the pre-war sets. Prewar radios are collectable, postwar are difficult to even give away.

    One interesting note regarding prewar radios was the concept of High Fidelity introduced by Philco’s Models 200X and 201X introduced in the fall of 1934. This was achieved by increasing the receivers selectivity through a control affecting the IF (Intermediate Frequency) bandwidth to use most of the allocated bandwidth of the assigned AM broadcast channel. A Fidelity switch would often have positions for voice, and music (two or more settings). A broader bandwidth setting on a voice broadcast could introduce additional noise as Amplitude Modulation reception is quite susceptible to atmospheric noise received at the antenna.

  4. Soundminded

    August 31, 2012 at 2:00 pm

    The challenge of providing high quality stereophonic sound in a single package presented at least two technical challenges. One was getting sufficient stereo separation, that is getting the speakers far enough apart without an enormously wide cabinet. Some manufacturers tried side firing speaker while others had speakers that could be separated but had matching cabinetry. Another was installing a turntable in a cabinet where the speakers could produce significant bass without acoustic feedback. Among the better manufacturers of all in one or similar types were Fisher and KLH. A different solution was to provide the speakers in separate cabinets and provide a matching cabinet that could be customized to the owner’s other equipment. Often the equipment included Marantz, McIntosh, Thorens, Empire, Revox, Ampex, and Tandberg components. Here the JBL “Olympus” is such an example;

    http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/jbl/catalogs/1971-home/page06.jpg

    There is a similar more traditional “Sovereign” model.

    http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/jbl/catalogs/1971-home/page07.jpg

    Whatever you think of the JBL speakers themselves, these cabinets were made to very high standards. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder IMO these are far more appealing to look at than anything I’ve seen on the market these days. I think most women would find them attractive additions to the furnishings in a living room. Clearly a wall mounted flat panel TV can hang over the equipment cabinet.

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