“Victrola” curbside find
Posted By azog on August 7, 2009
This was sitting at the curb with a big “FREE” sign on it. If it’s free, it’s for me.
Some sort of “Victrola” record player. I say “Victrola” because it’s not really a Victrola, but I guess the same principle applies. According to the inside lid, it identifies as a “Sonora” , “The Instrument of Quality! Clear as a bell!” The date on the banner says 1915, but that’s probably just for the award(s) it won. I have no idea, yet, what date this is.
Even if it’s not a real Victrola, you just don’t see stuff like this anymore.
No electronics, no speaker, manual hand-crank. Steel needles to play the record! Whoever threw this out was considerate enough to include a handful of replacement needles, and a record.
You can see that it needs a bit of TLC.
Here is a short video of it playing. The record skips terribly. I don’t know if that is because the record is damaged, or the needle needs replacement.
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i was lucky enough to run across an identical victrola and when i first saw it it was like omg i hit on something here what do you know about this specific victrola? get back to me about that i’m looking to sell it if possible
@michael, sorry for the delay in responding. I haven’t really looked into these players with much detail, but it appears they were fairly common. I did find some links while searching “sonora record player”. Since mine works to fair degree, other than needing some cleaning and probably some wood restoration, I just left it as it is. I don’t really know what the value is, and I wouldn’t really use ebay as a determination. My best suggestion would be to search for some Victrola mailing lists, there seems to be an active community for these.