Several manufacturers made these, with Atwater Kent being one of the most popular. They allowed your radio to be played thru the horn of your phonograph. While this may sound silly to us now, in the 1920s the radio speakers were pretty feeble and rather poor sounding. And most radio sets of the day required that you separately purchase the speaker. For those owners who already had a nice phonograph with a good horn on it, these speaker drivers were a good solution. The speaker driver was less costly than a complete radio speaker, and in many cases the driver sounded better when played thru a good phonograph horn than any separate radio speaker of the day. This was especially true in the late 1920s if you had an orthophonic horn in your Victor console phono. The model number of the A-K drivers indicates the type of phono they were designed to fit. The 5V model indicates that it was designed for coupling to the Victor tonearm in place of the standard phono reproducer. I believe the ones designed for Columbia machines were a model number something like 5C. I don't recall if there were any A-K drivers made to fit Edison machines.
Greg Bogantz ----- Original Message ----- From: "ny victrolaman" <[email protected]> To: <phono-l at oldcrank.org> Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2008 2:01 PM Subject: [Phono-L] What is this? Atwater Kent Type 5V phonograph attachment > So I was cleaning out some storage and came across what looks like a large > 1920s radio horn speaker driver, which I must have picked up someplace > years > ago. It's about three inches in diameter, with a nine-foot cord, and it's > quite heavy for its size. (The driver itself tests very good.) On the > top > it is embossed "Atwater Kent, Phila" and Type 5V. After doing some > digging, > I found an old ad for it on that great AK website. The ad lists it as a > "Phonograph Attachment," but says nothing about what exactly that is, what > it does, and how exactly one would use it. I recall seeing some old ads > where something of this nature is sitting on a motorboard next to a > reproducer, but that tells me nothing. Does any out there know about > these > things? Anyone own one, or is anyone looking for one? I'll be happy to > send you pictures if it'll help clear this up. Thanks in advance. > _______________________________________________ > Phono-L mailing list > http://phono-l.oldcrank.org
