r/VintageRadios

Hey, I'm hoping to gauge interest in these items and see if anyone here can identify the badges that aren't Decca/Cossor.

I am looking to sell to add growing electronic tool collection. (Decent bench power supply is my next upgrade!) Do you think it's worth my time trying to sell?

Hello :)

I am completely new to the world of vintage radios. This week I got this fantastic Philips BX335U from someone who wanted to throw it away!

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/philips_bx335u.html

I tried everything and it can only receive one local AM radio station so I think it is broken? I don't really mind because it is beautiful as it is, just to look at it. But I have some questions:

1. Is it possible it would receive more stations with an antenna? If so how would I be able to find and attach an antenna that would be suitable?

2. I have heard it is possible to attach a Bluetooth receiver like you can use for car radios to these old radios without opening or altering them. I would not want to break it in any way because I think it is important to preserve old things for the future (I collect lots of old things). How would this work? I tried to find out but I cant find a guide for this particular radio and I am a bit hesitant to experiment with it on my own because as said I don't want to break it.

3. Following this, is it possible to also connect an external FM radio to it to still listen to the sound of the old radio but with a little help from outside? I don't see myself fixing the radio right now, maybe later though.

Hope to hear from you and have a good day.

I've had this radio for a while now. I picked it up in the early 80's I think. It's in pretty good shape overall. The power cord is badly frayed and the speaker wire is loose. It worked when I bought it but I'm afraid to try it now after all these years

its been electrically restored but the things falling apart, it was in a very humid area when I got it. Hinges are rusted bad and the wood is getting weak towards the bottom, and the leatherette(?) is peeling and torn in some spots.

Dont worry, the fuse and cord is somewhat temporary.

Hey everyone, new guy here who's been wanting to find an old radio for his tiki space and ended up with a bit of a find.

Today my 15 year old snapped a pic of an old radio he thought I'd like. I did just a few minutes of research after he got home and showed me and we were racing back to the thrift store! $40 and I was walking out with a 40 pound 73 ish year old radio.

From what I can tell so far, everything is there. However, I have no idea how to tell if any of the tubes are bad. It looks like the plug has been updated to a three prong and it's set to 110V.

I'm tempted to plug it in and see what happens, but I also don't want to wreck it within a couple hours of getting it home. I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on it, especially the writing and stamped text on the inside.

Thanks!

Hey all, I have a 1930s DeForest Crosley model 850 that is missing the entire radio chassis. It only has the clock as of now. Is anyone able to point me in the right direction of sourcing a compatible 3-knob tube radio? Any help is appreciated :D btw I live in British Columbia, Canada. 2 more pictures are in the comments (if I can post pictures there), as I can only post 1 here.

This has been sitting in my parents attic for the last 30 years probably and my grandparents for who knows, 40/50 years before that.

Cant find any mention of The Edinburgh Radio House online although I know that was just the retailer.

Manufacturer: British Thomson-Houston Co. Ltd. (BTH), Rugby, England.
Model: Bijou Crystal Receiver
Instructions sheet: Fifth Edition, January 1924
Registration: G.P.O. Registration No. 361
Retailer: David Gardner Watson, Electrical Engineer, 126 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh (“The Edinburgh Radio House”)
Type Approved By the Postmaster General - BBC logo on the front.

Now that I have it in hand, I can see more of the problems. The volume dial is extremely sensitive and most of the time turning in only leads to incredibly loud static. Sometimes I can get it dialed so that I can hear the stations. The audio has a slight bit of static but with a radio this age I kinda expected that. Does anyone know anything about the volume control issue and how I might fix that? Thank you so much!

I found this radio clock in my great grandfather’s old stuff. I know it’s from the 90s based on series of clock radios this one is from, but I can’t find a single image of this exact model online. Can anyone help with getting more info about this model.

I have just finished my latest project: restoring and upgrading this vintage radio! It had been a fantastic project to work on and I want to go a little into detail and explain how I built it.

First of all, a bit of backstory: A friend of mine had this unit in his living room as a decorative object. It was not working in its original state. That's why he had put two cheap PC speakers inside the cabinet and connected them to a equally cheap turntale with Bluetooth. As this wasn't exactly an elegant solution, he reached out to me and asked if I could restore and modernize the radio. He wanted bluetooth, (internet)radio and if possible AirPlay. All while preserving the original aestetics of the unit. So I got to work...

The first thing that came to mind was the screen. I deffinitely wanted a display that fits into the scale showing the current tuned frequency. As a screensaver, a custom VU meter in the radio's frontplate design shall be shown, so it blends in nicely with the overall looks. I ended up getting a waveshare 1280x400px touch screen for Raspberry PI.

The choice of a raspberry PI as the main computer was also pretty obvious. It ticks all the boxes spec wise, has great software support and using HATs I can expand the funcionality further.

Of course, I also need some sort of amplifier. Originally, I wanted to keep the tube amplifier inside the unit, but it consumed so much space, was extremely low power and the heat from the tube probably also would not have been that good for the PI. So I opted for a HiFiBerry AMP 2. Super efficient, high power class-D amplifier made for the RPI.

The original speaker setup also had to be replaced. The electrostatic tweaters would have sounded amazing, but cannot be driven using the amplifier I have chosen. But of course, I kept them in storage for later use. As I was on a pretty tight budget, I chose two Visation BG20 full-range drivers. They are very cheap at only around 35€ per piece and had some good reviews. This turned out to be a great descision as they really sound amazing for their price.

So that's it for the components.

Next up, software: And that was the first big challenge. There are quite a lot of options out there. I started with MoOde. Easy to set up and good functionality. But it is not very extensible. I needed a UI that works with a rotary encoder, as I could not use the touch screen of the display through the glass. And due to the architecture of MoOde, it would have taken ages to implement all that.

So after a lot of searching, I stumbled across Berryaudio: www.berryaudio.org . It is a very new media player OS, but has some very good features. And being written in python using a very extendable architecture, it was the way to go. I want to give a huge shoutout to the developer of Berryaudio, Varun Gujar, who really did some amazing work with his project. I changed quite a lot, so it suits my very specific needs. You can find my forks of the core and frontend here: https://github.com/FloTec508/berryaudio https://github.com/FloTec508/ba-frontend. Mainly, I added support for RadioBrowser, my custom button and encoder system, UI navigation using rotary encoders and some UI tweaks to fit the letterbox screen. Some of my changes are now even part of the official repo.

The first parts started to arrive and I began design and assembly.

One of the biggest hardware challenges were the source selection buttons. There are six latching buttons at the front of the unit. I wanted to use them for source selection. But there was one issue: what if the user switches source using the web interface or the screen on the device? In this case, the buttons would be out of sync with the software. Soooo, I decided to motorize them. I prototyped the first revision of the design, utilizing small 9g servos and levers to actuate the buttons from the back. That worked surprisingly well, so I refined the design and had a working mechanism.

I needed some way to control and monitor the buttons and encoders and report changes to the berryaudio core. I decided to offload the monitoring to an external STM32 microcontroller. I wrote a bit of code that continously reads the button and encoder states and creates a event "fifo-type" buffer, where events are pushed in. Once new events are inside the pipeline, a interrupt pin gets pulled HIGH to signal the Raspberry PI to request data from the STM32. I does so using the virtual serial port of the STM32 and receives a list of all registered events scince last request. This way, I only have to monitor one pin on the PI and have enough headroom for delays thanks to the event buffer. The system is bidirectional. so the RPI can send Events into the STM32's timeline for it to process. In my case this is only used for updating the button states.

All of that took a lot of tweaking and testing, during which I started building the speakers. This was my first time building speaker cabinets. After some research, I decided to use a bass reflex design. The speaker chambers originally were open at the back, so not airtight at all. Therefore, I needed to seal everything using acrylic sealing compound and wood plates where needed. I build adapterplates for the new, bigger speakers and fitted them. Inside the hole of the former tweaters I put the bass reflex tubes. I calculated their length and printed them on my 3D printer. Lastly, I added padding to all sides of the chamber and sealed them up. And to my surprise, they sound incredible! Nothing high-end for sure, but keeping in mind I paid 70 bucks for the drivers, the result is amazing! I tuned the EQ a little to get even more out of the speakers.

So all in all I am very pleased with the results. It looks, sounds and feels amazing. And my friend was impressed and happy with the results. So what do you want more?

Well, I put in a speculative eBay bid on a 1929 Zenith Model 33 tabletop radio, and ended up getting it.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/147384055202

Unfortunately custom shipping looks like a dealbreaker, so putting out feelers if anyone may be traveling from the Springfield MA / Hartford CT area, in my general direction (Iowa/Missouri). For some compensation of course. Would be my first TRF unit, BTW. Anyway, thought another classic radio enthusiast might be interested to help salvage this old set. Thanks for any suggestion you may have.

It power is on fine. The radio lights up as you can see. However, there is no sound and when you put it in record mode, it does not spin. when I put it in radio mode, no sound comes out of the speakers. I know absolutely nothing about electronics. Where would be my best place to start with this? I really hope this is the right place to ask.

Edit: thank you all for the wonderful advice. I’m gonna find someone to help me get this fully restored you guys are all awesome.

Thorough service and repairs.
The 2d one of its life, previous one in 1987.
It works beautifully, but there are no stations transmitting any more.

Hello all, this has been a truly educational experience already. I'm now learning how to recap those paper electrolytics because that apparently was never done either on this unit which is absolutely fantastic. Does anyone know how the caps are meant to be wired here? I have 3 inner and 3 outer pins/fins, and I know the negatives are supposed to be tied together, but what is soldered to what? Thank you!

got a Jewel New Yorker TR-4, the tuning knobs been replaced and it seems a prior owner decided to glue the volume knob on. i tried to twist/pull the knob with it held in place (hence the metal scratch marks) but it doesnt want to go. not sure what to do here since i fear most glue solvents will damage the plastic knob and for all i know it has glue all the way down the knob so it might be impossible to really get at anyway.

im half tempted to just cut the shaft and glue it back on after recapping?

I recently replaced all paper capacitors with modern ones and I have also replaced all of the tubes. It uses a 90v battery. I was wondering with all of these cables where do I plug in the power? It’s a Crosley Model 535.