Here is my opinion: Until the Victor held patents expired, Victor had no sound competition if you exclude Edison. If you take a good lateral adaptor and put it in a C-19 or C-250 it sounds better than any inside horn Victor as it has a larger horn. The No 4 soundbox is Victor's best mica soundbox.
I only collect Victor and Edison, I have a Vic VI and an 8-12 which both sound very good, but I prefer the Edison sound over Victor. The best sounding Victor I have is my Vic VI with my glass diaphragmed No 4 reproducer, the EMG is the best sounding phono I have ever heard. Columbia stayed behind Victor until the Orthophonic age. Cheney has a very small horn so it has less volume than the Victrolas. After the Victor patents expired hundreds of companies produced phonos, some sound good and some don't. To directly answer your question I do not know of any Domestic non Edison phonograph that compares to the Victrola before the patents expired. The most successful competitor, Columbia, was inferior in both records, machines, and soundboxes until the patents expired. The sax horn HMV with the HMV No 4 is probably the best sounding acoustic phono, but it is related to Victor. Steve Richard Rubin <[email protected]> wrote: Here's a question I've wanted to ask everyone here for a while, now: Working off the assumption that Victors are the best-sounding phonographs (which seems to be a general concensus -- please feel free to disagree, though), who would you say made the second-best-sounding machines? Since we need to compare likes to likes, let's limit the field to inside-horn, pre-orthophonic disc phonographs. What do you think?
