Made to Last
If you’ve ever seen any of the incredibly cheap and poorly made Crosley brand suitcase style audio players at Walmart or another big box store, this is the original design they were trying to imitate. This is a Symphonic Enterprises single speed, mono reel to reel tape player and recorder.
There is very little information about Symphonic available online, but they appear to be a Canadian company that imported Japanese-made portable A/V gear in the 50s, 60s and 70s. I was fortunate to find this almost like-new example of a late vacuum tube era reel to reel on shopgoodwill.com. Its chunky electrical components and all metal mechanical parts are secured to a hefty metal frame inside a stout wooden case.
For a minimalist, simple tape player and recorder, there’s definitely no planned obsolescence here. It even came with a very stylish all-metal little microphone.
Belts and Oil
This reel to reel just needed a few touch ups. Thankfully, all the tubes were still intact and functional. Tracking down replacements these days can get expensive and time consuming. This unit had two large rubber drive belts, which while stretched and loose had not melted or broken. Finding replacement belts on ebay.com is generally very easy.
With the belts replaced, a few drops of strategically applied sewing machine oil and a cursory wipe down, this tape recorder is almost good as new.
Magic Eye
This unit contains five mostly common vacuum tubes, I assume as part of the amplification circuit. I was unable to locate any schematics for it. The wire tube retainers are a nice touch to help protect them while carrying the unit around.
One of the more interesting parts of this tape recorder is the “magic eye” vacuum tube. These are simple visual indicators of the strength of an electronic signal. They are most often seen in radios to help the listener locate the strongest point of a radio signal on an analog tuning dial. Here it’s used just to monitor the strength of the microphone signal during recording, like a simple VU (“vee-you”) meter. I love the subtle green glow of them and it adds a bit a class to this otherwise plain front panel.
I almost didn’t post this, since it wasn’t much of a repair or restoration, but it had enough unique bits and seems to be rare enough online that I wanted to share my experience with it. The sound is certainly not hi-fi but it definitely looks good on the shelf!
Total Restoration Cost: $130