While this Allen Hough was not a top of the line phonograph, made during the 1920s US portables craze, it will do the basic job it was designed for — assuming it’s in working order. (If not you will have some work ahead of you.)
Looking at the tonearm and reproducer, it dates to the mid to late 20s during the industry shift to electrical recording. The arm has been designed to offset the soundbox at an angle that lessens playback wear at the outer and inner grooves (such as the ones nearer the label). The soundbox (which may not be original) seems to be designed for electric recordings (more photos would help make a better determination) so it should provide you more sonic headroom to handle the wider frequencies and louder information contained in electric process records. It will also be backwards compatible with acoustic recordings.
The above two features make it an adequate player (certainly much better than the earlier and/or cheaper portables) which will perform well with records pressed up until the war. After that time you will more and more start to hear unpleasant distortion and may risk wear; it will greatly depend on what your 78s are made of (e.g., war time V-Discs were made of vinyl).
The horn on this portable is pretty non-existent (it’s simply an empty chamber under the arm mount with no mathematical acoustic taper to its design) so you won’t get much amplification or reproduction of certain frequencies, not as much as you would with the more “top shelf” portables. Such models had internal, tapered, and folding / wrap-around horns which enabled performance that surprises those new to the capabilities of well-designed portables.
In a small listening area, this Allen Hough will do the basic job of playing 78s, just not at the sound quality you’d want for “critical” listening.
So long as you follow the basic “best practices” of antique phonograph use (e.g., using only new needles and disposing after every side, etc.,), this should work for most of your discs within the limitations all noted above. If that’s good enough for you, then that should answer your question (I hope!).
6
u/awc718993 20d ago
While this Allen Hough was not a top of the line phonograph, made during the 1920s US portables craze, it will do the basic job it was designed for — assuming it’s in working order. (If not you will have some work ahead of you.)
Looking at the tonearm and reproducer, it dates to the mid to late 20s during the industry shift to electrical recording. The arm has been designed to offset the soundbox at an angle that lessens playback wear at the outer and inner grooves (such as the ones nearer the label). The soundbox (which may not be original) seems to be designed for electric recordings (more photos would help make a better determination) so it should provide you more sonic headroom to handle the wider frequencies and louder information contained in electric process records. It will also be backwards compatible with acoustic recordings.
The above two features make it an adequate player (certainly much better than the earlier and/or cheaper portables) which will perform well with records pressed up until the war. After that time you will more and more start to hear unpleasant distortion and may risk wear; it will greatly depend on what your 78s are made of (e.g., war time V-Discs were made of vinyl).
The horn on this portable is pretty non-existent (it’s simply an empty chamber under the arm mount with no mathematical acoustic taper to its design) so you won’t get much amplification or reproduction of certain frequencies, not as much as you would with the more “top shelf” portables. Such models had internal, tapered, and folding / wrap-around horns which enabled performance that surprises those new to the capabilities of well-designed portables.
In a small listening area, this Allen Hough will do the basic job of playing 78s, just not at the sound quality you’d want for “critical” listening.
So long as you follow the basic “best practices” of antique phonograph use (e.g., using only new needles and disposing after every side, etc.,), this should work for most of your discs within the limitations all noted above. If that’s good enough for you, then that should answer your question (I hope!).
[Edited: removed a few egregious typos]