1924 Nyaccoflex Combination Amplified Crystal Radio & Portable Phonograph * Exposed Tubes * New York Album & Card Co. * NYACCO
$1,650.00
No Sales Tax If Shipped Outside North Carolina.
The Nyaccoflex R.P.I is what happens when a bunch of marketing guys decide they’re going to venture into the realm of engineering. Manufactured briefly in the early 1920’s by the New York Album & Card Company, the R.P.I. is part phonograph, part crystal radio, part audio amplifier, part battery box, part record album, part briefcase, and entirely over the top — like getting everything on the diner menu brought to your table when all you ordered were the scrambled eggs.
The world’s first Boom Box (and the only surviving example known), this R.P.I. is in very good condition throughout, and it’s clearly original throughout. Minor wear to the leatherette exterior, but the radio and phonograph housed inside are clean and operable, albeit to a limited extent. Tubes are good, transformers are good, coils are good, spring motor is good, but the phonograph’s armboard, which folds into the mouth of the horn when the lid is lowered, is designed in a manner that introduces quite a bit of drag as a record is playing, causing the turntable to run somewhat erratically. Likewise the radio, with a crystal detector coupled to an electrified amplifier, has its own problems, with high voltage B+ noise running untethered through the audio circuit.
That said, the core idea behind this all-in-one entertainment center was and is fairly brilliant, and had it been more thoughtfully executed, it might have succeeded in changing the radio and phonograph landscape a bit more than it did.
SOLD
