hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2614.txt

Episode: 2614
Title: HPR2614: My 1948 Truetone D1835 Tube Radio
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2614/hpr2614.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:34:45

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This is HPR Episode 2614 entitled, My 1948 Truton D1835 Dube Radio.
It is hosted by John Culp and is about 11 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summer is, I talk about my new, 1948 D1835 Dube Powered Radio.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
University Access to All Knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hey everybody, this is John Culp and Lafayette Louisiana recording another episode of
Hacker Public Radio.
And this morning I'm in our new house that I've mentioned a few times in previous podcasts.
And taking this opportunity to talk about something I've hinted at in the last couple
of episodes.
And that is a new radio that I got now new as a relative term.
It's new to me.
It's actually very old in terms of when it was built.
What I bought is a Truton.
What is the model?
I think I've got the model number maybe in the YouTube video that I posted of it, but
I'm going to put some pictures in a link to like a photo album on Flickr in the show
notes that has some pictures of the exterior and the insides and stuff like that.
But it's a Truton radio that I've determined is from 1948.
It's very large.
It's about three feet tall and two feet wide, maybe a foot deep.
It's like a console kind of radio.
It's got a large cabinet.
And the power on the inside is tubes.
Of course this is way most electronics back then were done was by tubes.
This is a tube radio and I picked this up at an estate sale.
And it worked and the wife gave the green light.
She loved it.
It thought it would be perfect.
This is another one of those things that we decided.
We just bought this house that's a 1950s era house and it'd be cool to have some things
in it that are from that time period.
And this radio seemed to fit just fine.
And so we bought it and when I got it home I discovered not only did it work, but also
it's got a really surprising feature, at least from something of that time.
It was surprising to me anyway.
And that is it's got an auxiliary input.
So it doesn't just let you play AM and FM radio, which it does, although maybe I just
need a better antenna, but I can't seem to get many stations on this thing.
Although the one station it does get really really well is an awesome oldie station, AM 1330.
And it's funny it's tagline is the greatest hits of all time.
Of course the greatest hits of all time for them means the greatest hits of the top
40 from the 1960s through the 80s.
So the the music the time period of the music is not exactly appropriate for the radio,
but it somehow it seems very quaint coming out of this radio.
And it actually sounds pretty good.
So it but anyway I found that there is an RCA input.
So I found amongst my mini audio cables, if you guys are like me, you probably have
a box full of cables and adapters and all kind of stuff like that.
And I found a cable that goes from RCA to 3.5 millimeter mini plug, which of course is
what you can plug into a phone.
And I plugged that cable into the back and then plugged the mini plug into my phone and
played with the selector switch that changes between AM and FM.
And I found that it has a third setting for auxiliary.
One part of the problem is that somebody I think refurbished this thing and I put that
in air quotes because they it looks like they took it apart and then painted the entire
cabinet black where it probably originally was some kind of dark wood finish.
At least the pictures I found of comparable models online were a natural wood finish and
not paint.
But they also painted over any indications on the case as to what selector you're on.
And so you kind of have to either remember which position each thing is in or else just
kind of played by air each time.
But I plugged my phone in, started playing something and then played with the selector until
low and behold I heard the sound that was coming out of my phone coming from the speaker
of the radio.
And so in that respect it's very versatile.
It would be a very trivial matter to convert this into a Bluetooth enabled 1940s radio
because you just get a Bluetooth adapter plug it into the RCA input and there you go.
I haven't done that yet because I've got a couple like three or four other Bluetooth devices
in the house and I don't want to get device confusion going here but we might get there
at some point.
Right now the wife and I really like the radio station that it gets and so we've just
been playing the radio while we clean the house and move furniture around and do stuff
like that and we're both really enjoying it.
Is there anything else to say before I fire it up?
So I'm going to turn on the radio and it's going to be on this radio station and I promise
Ken Fallon that I will not play more than a few seconds of music that could be copyrighted
and make us fall afoul of any copyright laws.
Then I'm going to demonstrate just playing an audio file from the phone.
I've downloaded from archive.org a broadcast of a 1954 World Series game I think.
I mean if I were a kid in the 1940s and 50s I would have been wanting to listen to
radio baseball games on the radio.
In fact that's what I did when I was I love radios.
As far back as when I was six, seven, eight years old I remember having this little transistor
radio and I loved baseball.
We lived in middle Ohio and of course the local team for us was the Cincinnati Reds and
the Reds had a couple of legendary broadcasters that gave just great audio broadcasts and
I remember taking that little radio into my bed every night and turning it on and listening
to the Reds games and so I have really fond memories of listening to baseball on the
radio incidentally if you hear creaking sounds that's me walking around on the hardwood
floor in the house every once in a while there will be a creak in the audio I'm sure.
Okay, I'm going to turn on the radio now.
Since it's a tube radio it takes a moment before the sound actually starts to happen and
so it's hard to know exactly how far to turn the volume and power knob to get the right
volume.
Play it by ear.
Here we go.
Okay, I've turned it on and a light has illuminated the analog dial where you can see
AM frequencies and FM frequencies and the name true tone.
There we go.
That's a song that's playing just on this radio station right now.
I've actually got it turned down fairly low.
This radio will go very loud.
Okay, so I'm going to plug in my phone now and change the selector.
I think I've got an on-exilery now and I'll play it I'll try to play this audio file
from my phone.
Where's my VLC app?
There we go.
Okay, I'm going to turn up the volume here and here we go, yep.
Here's the baseball game.
You may be interested in the fact that this is the 12th time in 49 World Series.
That's the classic has gone the limit of seven games.
Of course, there was a time, you remember when the Easter play passed five out of nine.
Prior to the seven game limit, when it was necessary to win five out of nine, the series
went to eight games four times.
In the 11 previous series that have gone the seven game limit, the National League teams
have won seven out of it if you decide to put any faith in previous happenings.
Sounds like they're just doing the preliminaries for the game there, but I don't know, but you guys,
but anybody who grew up listening to baseball on the radio and who likes baseball appreciates
that kind of broadcast and also, man, the sound of that broadcast coming out of that radio
is just wonderful and we're in a house that comes from the 1950s and we're starting to
get some furniture from that area too because for one thing, it looks good and for another
we're finding that modern furniture doesn't fit as well in a house like this as it does
in modern houses, like it's generally too big.
So I just bought a chair last night at Salvation Army for 20 bucks, that's probably a 1950s
or 60s armchair and it's much smaller than the armchair is that you'll find at most furniture
stores now and it fits these smaller rooms that have lower ceilings and stuff like that.
Anyway, I hope you'll go look at the pictures that I've posted on my Flickr account of the radio.
I've got a photo of the whole unit from the front and then I've got a really nice picture
of the guts of it in the back that shows the tubes and the big wheel that turns the cord
for the analog radio dial and a transformer and the capacitors and various stuff like that.
And then I also turned it on its side and took a picture through the bottom where you can see
the big speaker on the front of the case and what looks like an antenna on the side of the case,
it looks like a long cable round, round and round and round and round and round and so I'm assuming
that's an antenna. Probably the AM antenna, I don't really know, NY Bill or some person more
familiar with electronics, probably be able to answer that question better than I can.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed hearing about and hearing a little bit of actual playback
from my 1948 True Tone 2 Radio. This has been John Culp in Lafayette, Louisiana. Bye, y'all.
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