The Unplugged World of the Acoustic Gramophone

Human-powered gadgetry is just so fascinating to me. A boring comment but true. Unlike my hunt for a modern emergency charger/radio that is sufficiently run on hand crank power, these older devices manage just fine. I tend to think of modern as meaning more energy efficient but perhaps I'm incorrect in that assumption!

Thanks for that Matt.. My missus has always dreamt of owning a wind-up gramophone as her parents had one and I've never got round to getting her one. Now, armed with relevant knowledge from watching your very informative video, I was able to make an informed purchase on eBay (auction 153949573402 - got it for a little less than the asking price). I doubt she'll every want to play it, it just has to be shiny..

Puppets!!!! I'm very happy :)

Noticed that the public version was a reupload — great that you got a less concerning-looking shot of the playing needle!

I find it a bit funny that in the 20’s and 30’s there was a discussion weather the acoustic or electric playback was better. You had early magnetic pick-up and HMV Re-entrants and later EMG’s and Radiograms. A bit like analogue vs digital discussion of today.

Are you planning on doing a video dedicated to the Edison Gem from the „sock” segment?

Well, I certainly learned a few things during that video. Good stuff.

The return of the Moans! 🥰 Thanks Mat!

Brilliant, as we've all come to expect. Thank you!

love it! i inherited a stack of shellac records when my great grandma passed last year. hope to one day get a functional machine to play them on, but it's daunting. the videos help. :)

My parents acquired a 1930s vintage multi-function player once. It sported a 78 record player, and a multi-band radio receiver. Full of vacuum tubes as well. The first time I electrocuted myself was trying to fix a dodgy connection to the speaker. I was 16 at the time. I learned then to respect electricity.

learnt a lot from that, as always keep smiling

Very enjoyable, Mat. Excellent close-ups, too. One of the best.

The only thing that's missing now is for Anders Enger Jensen to release Retro Grooves on 78!

Glad to see the puppets back! I was actually going to ask what the cause was of that horrible grinding sound when you played the first record. I wondered if they always sounded that way or what. I'm glad you answered that. I honestly didn't realize they would have sounded better. That's one of the reasons, for example, that I like to restore these older computers. I don't want people to think that yellow and brown was the typical color of computers from the 70s and 80s.

Another great video. Thank you.

Thanks. And I'm certain Mel, Rowan and Griff would have enjoyed your LoFi shop interlude.

Deep joy! The return of "The Moans"! Fascinating video.

Very enjoyable video!

Brilliant video. One of your best, for sure. Thanks!

There is something addictive about the whole medium, maybe it is the smell! I have some really good sounding 78’s from the 1940’s by the likes of Benny Goodman. I have a EAR valve record player to play them on. But now I want to get another windup one now.

As a child, in the 1970's I was given a HMV 101 grammaphone and some 78's to "play" with. It gave me hours of innocent fun. I have loved me medium even today, being a collector of ,78's. Sadly I no longer have the player, the mechanism broke and it was sold. Seeing your video brought back some happy memories. I wish I still had it now. Oh well. Good to see the puppets again. Stay safe.

I was getting some serious Not The Nine O'Clock News vibes from the Moans sketch! Great video as always.

Wonderful macro shots of stone age high-tech! Interesting fact: in colloquial Swedish, shellac 78s are known as "stenkakor" - literally "stone biscuits". 😳 I've inherited a portable grammophone (from the 1920s, I believe?) Hadn't given much thought to it before, but now I must investigate its make and model further! Perhaps it can be sold, or donated, to someone who refurbishes them... 🤔

This video is a bit of a personal revelation for me because... I actually used to have one of these! Actually, I had part of one of these. When I was about 9 years old I got interested in electronics and we had a neighbor who was into electronics too, and he had a record player that didn't work, and he gave it to me so I could have some fun taking it apart. But I found out the only problem was that the mains cord was loose in the plug, so I repaired it and it worked! I had a small transistor radio and the neighbor soldered the wire connection into it so I could just tune it away from any station and listen to one of the records that my dad gave me. As I said, the record player was in a case exactly like that one, with the needle tray and everything, only it was painted gray. The neighbor told me it was a 78RPM record player before someone took out the old mechanism and replaced it with an electric Garrard record player that could play 33, 45 and 78RPM records. The hole for the crank handle is where the power wire and the signal wire came out. So now thanks to this video I finally know a little bit more about the history of my first record player. And I finally know where the horn was: there was none; the case was the horn! Thanks for posting!

Fantastic episode, sure to be a hit! I know you've said several times before that muppet outros are hard to write and that's why you've done them so infrequently, but I loved their inclusion in the middle of the video to illustrate a talking point. I think it'd be great if you did that more often since we all love them so much; that way you don't have to mull around as hard on their "script" since they're just comically explaining something in the video you'd already be discussing! Plus, the added benefit of annoying those few people who skip the muppet outros :-) Keep up the good work! Edit: In regards to the legacy of these videos, have you considered a blu-ray collection of sorts for all your videos? Can't speak for the rest of the folks here but I'd purchase The Techmoan Collection in a heartbeat haha

Cheers Mat, real feel good vibe to that video, thoroughly enjoyed it. Put a nice cap on a good day, spent archiving Betamax home videos to digital for a friend ( had to service the recorder first and check all was OK) Just finishing up with the music playlist, got my woofers, got my tweeters, got my bag on my head, then i'm calling it a day. Thanks again

Great video Mat. Re. the bit where you hope that your videos can be watched by future generations (16 minutes in). I'm imagining, in the year 2120, your great-great-nephew issuing takedown notices for anyone on SpaceYouTube who wants to use the content.

Thank you, Mat! This is going on my shortlist of favorite Techmoan videos because it ticks so many boxes for me. Anything that works via pure mechanics will always get my attention! And my mind was officially blown when you said that our impressions of the actual sound quality of old records is based on faulty assumptions. Honestly, I just assumed folks in the 1930s just accepted the cracks and pops as being "better than nothing." Sort of like being ok with waiting twenty seconds for a jpeg or a GIF to load on dial-up modems in the early 90s. Superb work!

A gem of a video, Matt, with great production, vintage Muppets, and interesting info about the later-generation 78s and the remarkable quality of sound they stored in their grooves. I've run across a few "vinylite" 78s pressed in the mid or late 1950s. Those have fidelity as good as early 45s IMHO.

I was just thinking the other day that I miss the puppets. Yay!

You may notice in the photo of the acoustic recording session that the violin had a horn attached to it. On a podcast I heard (don't recall which one) they talked about how in order to hear violins (and maybe other stringed instruments) on acoustic recordings they had to modify them with the sound amplifying horn.

78s - better than you don't remember them! It's like a follow-up to the cassette video that was so good.

Excellent video! Instructive, well made and even the puppets appeared! I couldn't imagine that those Gramophones could sound rather good. Put the finger stylus scenes together in a loop and voilà you have your Techmoan ASMR video. ;-)

Mat, just a beautiful episode. I have to say, you can really feel the heart and soul behind this one. You sprinkled in some beautifully nostalgic moments and whilst it can be kind of melancholy talking of death and etc, it really gave the video some gravitas. I hope we all leave behind something important to the future generations. A few things I want to say is that I am totally behind you on antiques that "do" things. I watch the Antiques Roadshow and whilst a painting can be important historically and gives insight to a specific period, when they show a table or something I just dont care. But when it comes vintage instruments, cameras etc I love it. Cameras ESPECIALLY are still wonderful because you can still produce something special with it and I love that. Nothing more satisfying than cranking an old wind up part on any machine. Also there is a musical artist called The Caretaker who makes music out of old vintage 78's and they have that distinct crackly sound. Genuinely didnt know they used to sound good. Its kind of like how they always show the "past" in black and white (even you did it!)

This one looks very nice, and very familiar! My father has one too, doesn't look as shiny as this one, but still plays well. The only thing I cannot remember is it having the auto start and stop functions, maybe we never used it because it was broken? We put then a towel in the speaker horn to muffle the sound a bit, a sock might be to small indeed ;-). And then there is the whole emotion associated with it: we did not quite often play 78s, but when, my father gets in a very special mood, singing and dancing to the records. A similar way of emotion I get when playing records and reel-to-reel tapes (yes, I play my music in my Home Office at the moment using a 50-years-old Revox A77! I was always wondering how that would be at work, having the big spools turning, and a huge pair of headphones with this old-fashioned curly cable) I would love to have also such a portable machine and some 78s, maybe I find sometime such a machine, or wait until I inherit my father's one, but I hope that still takes some time...

You didn't mention that they were cranking out the 102's well into the rock & roll era - 'Rock Around The Clock' on 78 comes across so loud that more than a sock is required, I've got a couple of pairs of old underpants for the purpose, but this is a family show. A little known bit of extra is that the early Beatles records were issued on 78's for certain markets, notably India - I believe a 78 of 'Please Please Me' commands quite a few quid.

Very enjoyable video, Mat. I've got a couple of 101's in much poorer condition & have had a lot of enjoyment over the years.

Some brilliant info and links Matt. I didn't know that that machines like this continued to be made up to the 1950s. Perhaps a shortage of electronics or just using up existing parts. I always thought that it would be fascinating to try using a modern electronic transducer to the arm tube or box of a wind up Gramophone system. I used to know an old guy in London who had a massive house filled with musical history. Sadly he died and I will never know what happened to his massive collection. Great video Matt and an addition to my education.

Hi Mat. Had a portable gramophone for about 10 years (had magazine section to holding many records), and I still learned loads from this video. Didn't realise you could change the soundheads. Loved to see the puppets back, they really bring out your sense of humour. A certain religion carried gramophones on thier preaching work and made thier own unique gramophones that played "in the case". It's due to 78s I discovered the comic sandy Powell. Great video, now I know why my bill Haley sounded awful

I had a question about His Master's Voice and RCA. But I've learned to Google my questions before I ask. So now I can connect the dots. I laughed so hard when you weighed that tone arm!... I think back how I try so hard to maintain 2.5 grams on mine... Great video! Love this stuff!

You know what we call what the needle does at around 1:47 in German? Spanabhebende Datenverarbeitung, chip raising data processing. ;)

Fabulous, Mat - what a treat. I've always thought a wind-up gramophone would be a very desirable thing to own, and I do have a few of my grandparents 78s in the loft. I loved your puppets reference to the famous Not The 9 o'clock News sketch, an earlier version of which, incidentally appeared in a Burkiss Way episode on Radio 4 a couple of years earlier. The medal is in the post for daring to do the 'wind-up' joke! I hadn't realised that recipes for making 78s varied so much nor how that influenced the way they wore out. All the 78s I have ever heard have had a lot of surface noise, so hearing the one you played that was no worse than a not-too-clean vinyl record was a revelation. Happy VE day - have a great weekend, Mat!

Mini discs last week and "Maxi" discs this week showcasing wonderful antique mechanical gadgets. Bonus content: "Techmoan Episode XXIV--The Return Of The Moans."

Really fascinating. I have a 1920’s Atwater Kent radio with an optional record player. All electronic, but it looks like someone attached a motor and a massive cartridge to a wind-up machine. I wonder if the machines with horns sound any better that ones like yours. Proves that an S-shaped tonearm is superior as well. ;)

Totally worth it. Great video!

So excited to watch this after “coming home from work” (I.e. shutting down work laptop in my bedroom) this evening! Hope you’re staying sane Mat!

That was fascinating!

So glad to see the puppets making an appearance! :-D

Lots of really cool information there. I'm completely surprised by how good those records sound on that machine. Like most other people, I suspect, I would completely taken in by the common understanding that they were rubbish. Many thanks for that.

Love this one! Especially interesting to hear about the frequency response of the different tone arms and different volume styluses. You MAY want to address the shellac shavings collecting on the needle in the close-up shots of the records being played, though, as I'm sure that'll freak out some of your more sensitive viewers.