Excellent job, very well done! Finally a competent video about this interesting instrument, thank you for making and sharing this. One thing I would like to carefully and respectfully disagree with you about is the capacitor tuning bit you talk about at around 10 minutes into the video. If the instrument was never in tune out of the factory as you suggest, I doubt anybody would have bought it - also, it was very expensive when new. Another thing is that it was meant to be mounted under a piano, and I doubt a pianist would buy something that would butcher his sound when played together with the piano. I think the capacitors were hand-picked at the factory and each instrument had a "custom" set of capacitors. The values printed on capacitors are not their exact capacitances due to tolerance of +/- some % and in the 1940s the tolerances were very liberal compared to modern capacitors. They must have been individually selected, just like mica capacitors were hand-picked in radio receivers, to make the tuning dial track correctly. With time, capacitors deteriorated and their values drifted, putting the Solovox out of tune.
That's reasonable and I basically agree- but I can't believe in a factory, where they're trying to get units out the door en masse, they would sit there fiddling around like I did adding and subtracting caps of tiny values to get the temperament exactly right. I have no doubt it sounded fine when it was new, nothing like what it was when the unit first arrived here. Anyway I look forward to making a better demo of the thing one of these days.
Have you ever seen the Solo Pedal unit on the Hammond Concert Model organ? The pedal stops are the same as the Solovox except that they go down to 32 foot.
Btw Chris, I shared this on my page, tagged a few people you know
Excellent job, very well done! Finally a competent video about this interesting instrument, thank you for making and sharing this.
One thing I would like to carefully and respectfully disagree with you about is the capacitor tuning bit you talk about at around 10 minutes into the video. If the instrument was never in tune out of the factory as you suggest, I doubt anybody would have bought it - also, it was very expensive when new. Another thing is that it was meant to be mounted under a piano, and I doubt a pianist would buy something that would butcher his sound when played together with the piano.
I think the capacitors were hand-picked at the factory and each instrument had a "custom" set of capacitors. The values printed on capacitors are not their exact capacitances due to tolerance of +/- some % and in the 1940s the tolerances were very liberal compared to modern capacitors. They must have been individually selected, just like mica capacitors were hand-picked in radio receivers, to make the tuning dial track correctly. With time, capacitors deteriorated and their values drifted, putting the Solovox out of tune.
That's reasonable and I basically agree- but I can't believe in a factory, where they're trying to get units out the door en masse, they would sit there fiddling around like I did adding and subtracting caps of tiny values to get the temperament exactly right. I have no doubt it sounded fine when it was new, nothing like what it was when the unit first arrived here. Anyway I look forward to making a better demo of the thing one of these days.
@@cnagorka You still have it? That would be great!
Neat video indeed Chris.
Thanks! It was a little nerve wracking hooking the 'scope up as I've never done that with tube equipment, but it was worth it.
Amazing! Thanks for the video. How many valves does it have? Sorry, tubes. :-)
I believe it has 14! I bought a tube tester just to fix the thing up.
Have you ever seen the Solo Pedal unit on the Hammond Concert Model organ? The pedal stops are the same as the Solovox except that they go down to 32 foot.
Read about it about it but I've never seen one...I'd be interested to hear one.