Interesting, and I could never agree more. I have had quite a few (and still have) of the Victor, Brunswick, Sparton, and Majestic electrical horseshoe phonos. I agree that Victor had superior sound with their speaker that was, as Greg has said, unique to Victor's R-32 through RE-75 family of sets.
The Victor speaker was highly compliant. The cone was a fabric-based material, and the center spider of the cone suspension was the same material. The outer suspension was velvet cloth, and the cone travel was probably greater than any other speaker up to that time. It astounds me how many of those cones are still in service today, 79 years after manufacture. The amplifier of those models underwent several modifications during their manufacturing run. Many of those mods were not documented anywhere. The Achilles' heel of that model was the speaker cone, particularly the center spider mentioned above. If the volume on the radio were to be turned up to excess, the amplifier could blow the cone to destruction, by ripping the center spider right out. Evidently. Victor (or RCA,by then) recognized that problem, and added some resistors in the power amplifier to reduce the amplifier's gain, with hopes of saving the speakers. They shunted the grid nresistor of the 26 first audio with a second 500,000 ohm resistor. They then added another 500K resistor across the grids of the 45 power amps. This did cut back the ngain, though it was still possible to wipe out the speaker, if one were foolish enough, But worse yet, it showed glaringly on reduced phonograph volume. This mod is on quite a few of the amplifiers I've seen, and it is shown nowhere on Victor's service data. I customarily remove those resistors on my own sets, and on those of others, cautioning them against excessive volume. While I enjoy listening to the follow-on amplifier that appeared on RCA's Radiola 86, Victor RE-57, and quite a few other models, It is true that it was nowhere the speaker that was on the R-32 models. The R-32 speaker was totally bolted together, and was pretty surely a more labor intensive design than those later models. RCA went on to use some fairly stiff speaker cnes in the mid- thirties, probably to accomodate the higher power outputs of the amplifiers in use then. The RCA sets were not noted for low bass reproduction, yet they were enjoyable to listen to. Back in 1928, at the dawn of the dynamic speaker era (when they became more common), Majestic outsold the rest of the industry, because of their heavy bass output. They'd out-boom anything else in the store, and the buyers sucked them up like a vacuum cleaner. With the critical ear of today's listener, they border on being unbearable. But, not so in 1928! > [Original Message] > From: Greg Bogantz <[email protected]> > To: Antique Phonograph List <[email protected]> > Date: 3/21/2008 8:43:19 PM > Subject: Re: [Phono-L] Edison C2 performance > > I have a C-2. The pickup is essentially the same horseshoe magnet > pickup design as used in most of the contemporary models sold by Victor, > Brunswick, Atwater-Kent, etc. But Edison included a "scratch filter" > (Edison may have had another name for this, but I can't remember what they > called it) module located under the turntable motor board which was a > resistive-capacitive low-pass filter. This was ostensibly to filter out the > "needle scratch" noise which was supposedly indigenous to needle-cut > records, according to Edison company blather. Truth be told, it filtered > the noise from Edison DDs more effectively. DDs have inherently lower > signal to noise ratio (are noisier) due to their low modulation level > compared to the typical electrical Victor record of the day. This made the > DDs sound particularly noisy when compared with laterals played on the C-2, > so Edison included the filter which was not switchable. Consequently, all > records played on the C-2 are somewhat lacking in treble response compared > with, say, the superior sound obtained from the Victor micro-synchronous > RE-45 or RE-75 of 1929 which also used a similar horseshoe pickup without > the scratch filter. The C-2 generally has a tubby, boomy sound which is > fairly common with the early large console radios. Again, the Victor > micro-synchronous radios were a major exception to the rule. Their advanced > speaker design is largely responsible for their superior sound - good, > well-balanced sound over the audio spectrum without excessive bass boominess > while still providing extended bass response to quite low frequencies. > Curiously, this speaker (which is generally attributed to a Kellogg design) > was used by Victor and/or RCA in only that one model year of 1929. The > earlier and later speakers for many years were audibly inferior to the 1929 > model. I don't know why RCA didn't continue using the better design from > 1929 in their later models. Probably had something to do with patent > royalties on the Kellogg design that RCA didn't want to pay. > > Greg Bogantz > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Peter Fraser" <[email protected]> > To: "Antique Phonograph List" <[email protected]> > Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 7:07 PM > Subject: Re: [Phono-L] Edison C2 performance > > > > I've been meaning to ask this for some time now...how do the Edison > > electrical reproducers sound, when playing diamond discs? > > > > Sent from my iPhone > > > > -- Peter > > [email protected] > > > > On Mar 21, 2008, at 1:41 PM, "Bruce Mercer" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> Yes to all of the above. A C-2 I purchased some time ago had both the > >> 12"Roth and Martinelli records (among others) in the albums along with a > >> bunch of pop black with gold lettering on the labels. Ha anyone ever > >> seen a 10" classical with a gold label with black lettering? Needle > >> cuts, as far as I remember were sold from mid July to mid October 1929. > >> They were superior sounding records. > >> Bruce > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> Phono-L mailing list > >> http://phono-l.oldcrank.org > > _______________________________________________ > > Phono-L mailing list > > http://phono-l.oldcrank.org > > _______________________________________________ > Phono-L mailing list > http://phono-l.oldcrank.org
