mellotrongirl
Dial Loewe Opta Venus Luxus
What a gorgeous dial! The best vintage Euro-continental radio dial on the planet. A radio over 50 years old that's flawless & sounds great.
Can you imagine a radio like this being mass-produced? You have people shellacing, waxing and rubbing the woodwork. Lots of geppeto poindexter types testing and retesting all the tabs and buttons over and over again. People in lab coats with those famous German eyeglasses that have the horizontal brass bar straight across the top over both lenses going over each unit with a fine-toothed comb and calipers. The silkscreeners working on the dial faceplate with all those German cities, inspecting each one with macro monacles to make sure none of the letters dripped or ran. And still others stretching the high-tensil string over the wheels and pulleys that run the tuning dial mechanism....two separate bar indicators, and the right knob has a front and rear rotor for a revolving antenna inside. And to think there were 90 different styles of radios manufactured in West Germany between a couple dozen companies in the year 1957 alone. Many of them had tuning that went from right to left in those days, and the FM bandwidth was only from 88 to 100 instead of 88 to 108. Back then the FM bandspead was shortened to accomodate at either end adjacent military and police bands.
Even the woodgrain top of this radio was cut into four sections from the same board stock...reversed left to right, cut down the center and flipped front to back into four equal panels to display grain symmetry, and merged seamlessly like the elevator door facades at the Rockefeller Plaza.
Dial Loewe Opta Venus Luxus
What a gorgeous dial! The best vintage Euro-continental radio dial on the planet. A radio over 50 years old that's flawless & sounds great.
Can you imagine a radio like this being mass-produced? You have people shellacing, waxing and rubbing the woodwork. Lots of geppeto poindexter types testing and retesting all the tabs and buttons over and over again. People in lab coats with those famous German eyeglasses that have the horizontal brass bar straight across the top over both lenses going over each unit with a fine-toothed comb and calipers. The silkscreeners working on the dial faceplate with all those German cities, inspecting each one with macro monacles to make sure none of the letters dripped or ran. And still others stretching the high-tensil string over the wheels and pulleys that run the tuning dial mechanism....two separate bar indicators, and the right knob has a front and rear rotor for a revolving antenna inside. And to think there were 90 different styles of radios manufactured in West Germany between a couple dozen companies in the year 1957 alone. Many of them had tuning that went from right to left in those days, and the FM bandwidth was only from 88 to 100 instead of 88 to 108. Back then the FM bandspead was shortened to accomodate at either end adjacent military and police bands.
Even the woodgrain top of this radio was cut into four sections from the same board stock...reversed left to right, cut down the center and flipped front to back into four equal panels to display grain symmetry, and merged seamlessly like the elevator door facades at the Rockefeller Plaza.