Remember Those Living Room Consoles?

They were great furniture pieces. I'd love to gut one out and put newer electronics in it.

We had one growing up but I can't remember if it was an RCA or Zenith. The turntable was on one side and the AM/FM stereo with volume, bass, treble, was on the other side. I remember it being really long and on legs.

 

Way cool collection of Capitol Records swag! I love the serving tray.

I wonder if the console was modded for a gift to Capitol staff or something. I've never seen one either.

dan c

 

If you ever are in the market for a console and you happen to run into a SABA 4000, grab it. One of the best consoles ever made, using a nice set of the extremely efficient green cones and a quad of EL84s for output.

 

Indeed ! I still have that giant Console my parents had in the late 50ies and 60ies in my living room. I have my DUAL TT and Phonostage placed on top of it - Rock Solid. This piece is heavy and i store LP's and a lot of CD's on top and inside the console.
The wooden body was not only good for the looks, but also - like High End racks of today - excellent carriers of sound .
The paint doesn't show it but the wood is the bomb - Palisander !
Put a speaker in front and the soundstage becomes large...

 

Our first family console was a 1967 Philco. Still works to a point. Needs to be recapped, the Garrard changer (I installed it later on when the old V-M was beyond practical repair) overhauled and cleaned up. It sounded nice for the era.

 

Record Terrorists?? I love it.

Using the stock baseplate and platter, I bet you could rig the underguts of a Linn LP12 to do just that. You'd need the subchassis and bearing and the inner pulley, and you should be able to buy the Airpax motor for not a huge sum. Or use the Origin DC kit.

The stamped base plate could probably be damped with lead shot and epoxy.


I dunno. What do more knowledgeable turntable cobblers think?

 

Ours had a reel to reel as well. I could never get it to work.

 

My folks had a Sylvania tubed system. My brother practiced his trumpet to Al Hirt (and others) along with it. Years later I smoked the 10" woofers in it with my Sansui 8080.

My relatives both had Magnavox consoles and I have one of them. It's a tubed set too.

Bad thing was that the turntables had ceramic cartridges in them. Really not good enough for magnetic cart tracking anyway but I did use the Garrard from the Sylvania with a Shure cartridge.

 

When I was growing up in the suburbs, my dad had a massive 8' long Fisher console made with dark wood (popular in the late 60s/early 70s). You would open the top lid to access the horizontally mounted receiver and tape deck. There was also a turntable in there too. It was a stereo unit with 'curtained' speaker grilles - one on each side. It must have been fairly expensive back in the day. Eventually the turntable got busted and he used the top of the console to place an Akai receiver, Garrard record player and some brand of tape-deck.

One day when I was a teenager and interested in tube gear - I moved off all the equipment on top and opened up the lid. It was early solid-state gear - the tuner worked though. The speakers were pretty junky too. When my parents moved to a condo, the console got trashed.

 

There a nice looking Telefunken console on Craigslist-Chicago right now. Were these any good?

http://chicago.craigslist.org/nch/clt/845664296.html

Eric

 

So many people give Garrard turntables a bad name. "Noisy, idler drive, cheap" the list goes on. Let me start by saying the Garrard turntable is unique. Garrard's company's mission was to make the best audiophile record changers possible and did this, while constantly flirting with bankruptcy's. Record changers were the most expensive undertaking by any turntable manufacturer. Garrard lead the world in quality, and sound for three decades. They produced turntables that were as good as the recordings of the times. Case in point. In 1962 they came out with the AT-6, a metal stamped platter. Why metal stamped and not aluminum? After all the turntable they made back in the early 50's the 301 had a aluminum platter? Ever hear a steel band? Drums made out of 55 gal. barrels. They ring but only for a second or two unlike aluminum. Well, these platters play low level information on a record, for only a second, then the room acoustics take over. These turntables take the recorded performance, out of the studio and bring them right into your living room, for a very intimate sound. Yes there is motor noise, but these turntables were targeted to the mature crowd, not the young Rockers that love to blast music, so the town could hear it. Why idler drive? There is no, and has never been a more musical turntable than idler drive turntable. Extremely dynamic. Audiophile turntables belong in Radio stations because of the compression of the broadcast signal, these dynamic turntables would sound pumped pump if compressed and broadcast.

 

Yea, we had one of those big wood cabinet, it contained a Garrard turntable, receiver, not sure if it had 8-track. I seem to remember the sound was pretty good.

Of course I didn't do the speakers any favours when I started playing Kiss Alive! loud .

 

Classic Garrard tables are quite valuable today, but there is good reason to get away from rim drive in new designs. Belt drive, a heavy platter of a thermoplastic or thermoset synthetic or a sintered metal that is designed for nonresonance, and an excellent bearing are the standard now with good reason.

However the Garrards were well made and properly refurbished will still give good service in vintage systems. I would not build a new table that way today.

 

This thread really brings back some memories. Growing up in the suburban 60's, nearly everyone's parents had one of these in the "living room" (typically a room in which nobody did any "living" at all, except at Christmas time). It seems like 8 out of 10 of them were broken to one degree or another. I know ours was.

 

I've stumbled onto 2 of these in the past year an "Admiral - Symphonic" that needs tubed and a Zenith Solid State that looks almost new,works perfectly, all lights work and the only thing is the volume pot needs a little cleaning, the turntable even plays 16-33-45-78rpm recordings!

 

They pop up on youtube....

Restored RCA Vacuum Tube Stereo Console

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gNbs7tl-o74

 

Possible Classics

Although my family never owned one, a very good friend's family did. My memory is listening to Elvis and "Duke of Earl" on it.

I do not have first hand knowledge but I believe at one point some of these may have been considered "high end" audio in its day.

 

High end furniture maybe. The real "hi fi nuts" HATED consoles, hated, hated, hated them. You could buy a real system with a K-horn, a McIntosh amp and what was considered a good record player cheaper than consoles back then. They were usually very expensive.

The first consoles were basically component radio in a nice cabinet by companies like E.H. Scott (no relation to HH Scott) and Mcmurdo Silver. THose are very collectible antiques but not desireable as audio equipment. But most consoles were cheesy affairs, after WWII.

The Japanese are very big into the amplifiers and speakers out of Stromberg Carlson consoles. Go figure.

 

That was fun to watch, and listen to also (don't know who it was but it got my feet tapping).

 

YouTube is filled with videos of records playing on stereo consoles.

 

Woohaa ! They sound LARGE - was just listening to iTunes on my monitors and these Swing Beats just took over everything else. This is real High End i would say - Can't believe this mighty sound comes from this simple Record Changer - a bit noisy at the end, but once it plays music it s lovely !

 

my parents bought a Magnovox AM/FM/turntable console back in early '60s. I remember listening to my Monkees and Partridge family albums on it and cranking it when my parents were gone.

BTW...they still have it and it still works...and they still use it.

 

Artie Shaw. Note the feet tapping in the clip!

 

^ thanks for the artist info (forgot about this thread!).

Though if I had a console to show on the 'Tube, I would play some modern music on it, because there's something that's interesting to me about the contrast of seeing that era of gear playing something like this (a Kruder & Dorfmeister remix of Aquasky's "Kauna", from the !K7 label's DJKicks series). Energetic-but-soothing downtempo + walnut and tan wicker grill cloth = I don't know but I like it!