Saw a tube amp looking thingey in a junk store today. Seems to be in pretty good condition, and the price had been lowered a few times, so I said, what the hell... bought it.
There was an AudioKama print-out attached to it (the thrift stores know their stuff!), supposedly it is a GE "satelite speaker" circa 1963, the main stereo unit would send signal through the wall outlet and the satelite speaker will pickup the signal via the house wiring and play music.
Of course I don't have the main stereo unit, but I can at least use the audio amplification section, I thought...there are 4 tubes on a printed circuit board, the audio section uses 12AV6 and 12CU5.
I flipped the PCB around and traced the circuit a little and found the 0.022uf ceramic cap is the one coupling audio into the tone-control circuit (volume is after tone control). So I clipped the ceramic cap lead off....
And added a Vitamin-Q (as the LOD cap), connect to my diy-mod ...... (since the speaker is single channel, I added a 1k resistor to each channel and merged them together. Mono-sound is not as cool as stereo but I can live with that I supposed)
The sound was not bad. Has that "vintage magic". But it is worth over-doing, no? out goes the 191-series 0.47uf/200V Vit-Q, in comes the Russian FT-2 0.1uf/200V teflon....The cross-over cap was also changed to Avalon 5uf/100V polyprop. .. Then I added a short piece of belden cable and a 3.5mm in-line socket.....
It turned out the teflon has way too much resolution, shows all kind of limitation of the paper speakers, and is in general a bit too bright. More clear yes, but no more "vintage" flavor. I ended up adding the Vit-Q back in, in parallel with the teflon. Sounds like a happy middle-ground, for right now at least.
The sound is pretty detailed, voice is especially nice. Hi-Fi? no, but very enjoyable. much better than a typical boombox (again, especially the nice voice replay). The bass doesn't go low enough and is a bit boomy, but come on, it was made in 1960's....
So I supposed that made it a iPod/iMod speaker, steam-punk style.
Or I will use it with my little electric guitar, the sound is pretty smooth too.
There was an AudioKama print-out attached to it (the thrift stores know their stuff!), supposedly it is a GE "satelite speaker" circa 1963, the main stereo unit would send signal through the wall outlet and the satelite speaker will pickup the signal via the house wiring and play music.
Of course I don't have the main stereo unit, but I can at least use the audio amplification section, I thought...there are 4 tubes on a printed circuit board, the audio section uses 12AV6 and 12CU5.
I flipped the PCB around and traced the circuit a little and found the 0.022uf ceramic cap is the one coupling audio into the tone-control circuit (volume is after tone control). So I clipped the ceramic cap lead off....
And added a Vitamin-Q (as the LOD cap), connect to my diy-mod ...... (since the speaker is single channel, I added a 1k resistor to each channel and merged them together. Mono-sound is not as cool as stereo but I can live with that I supposed)
The sound was not bad. Has that "vintage magic". But it is worth over-doing, no? out goes the 191-series 0.47uf/200V Vit-Q, in comes the Russian FT-2 0.1uf/200V teflon....The cross-over cap was also changed to Avalon 5uf/100V polyprop. .. Then I added a short piece of belden cable and a 3.5mm in-line socket.....
It turned out the teflon has way too much resolution, shows all kind of limitation of the paper speakers, and is in general a bit too bright. More clear yes, but no more "vintage" flavor. I ended up adding the Vit-Q back in, in parallel with the teflon. Sounds like a happy middle-ground, for right now at least.
The sound is pretty detailed, voice is especially nice. Hi-Fi? no, but very enjoyable. much better than a typical boombox (again, especially the nice voice replay). The bass doesn't go low enough and is a bit boomy, but come on, it was made in 1960's....
So I supposed that made it a iPod/iMod speaker, steam-punk style.
Or I will use it with my little electric guitar, the sound is pretty smooth too.
