I found a floor radio. What's a floor radio? They Were Called Console Radios Once. Take a look.

Gentle reader,

Long before even I was born, there was no television. No Internet, almost no telephones and they all were attached to buildings.

Families were entertained by radio shows. To even call it a "show" confuses things. One had to use their imagination to fill in what they were hearing. It was a shared experience than carried over with TV. 

Then the Internet came along and companies figured out how to make it possible to access the Internet while on the move or without wires. Now so much of the western world and some of the eastern world spend their time bent necked looking a small screens. Sigh.

Below, is the "floor radio" I found at Salvation Army for $26.24. That's 25% off their $34.99 price being it was 25% off Wednesday.

Looks old, doesn't it? Well that's the idea. 

Note the three cut out areas behind the grille. I did not notice that at first. It wasn't until I took the back off did I see the three speakers.

Below is another Thomas reproduction radio atop the floor radio so you can gauge just how big it is. The small one and the others can be seen in my post about them from some time ago:

The Robb Collections: The Radio Collection 

Below is how it was wired in China. The device on the left is the cassette player. Basically it is crap. Yes it plays cassettes, but they don't sound as good as FM!

So you may be thinking, "The wires look OK to me." USA electricity is AC for alternating Current. That means the electricity is turning on and off sixty times a second. This can produce an audible hum of 60 Hertz in music or other reproduced sound. The AC power cord is parallel to and touching the speaker wires. A no-no. By the way, the three speakers, called "drivers" are top to bottom: Tweeter, Midrange, once called squawker, and woofer. Each provides a portion of the sound. Bigger is lower, smallest is highest in the sound spectrum of 20 to 20,000 Hertz or "Cycles per second". An electronic device called a crossover separates the music and sound and sends the signal portions to the correct drivers. Get it?

Below and above, you can see that I moved the AC cord to the opposite side of the cabinet. I also neatened up the black (input) and white (output) wires of the transformer. A transformer reduces the 120 volt AC voltage to whatever voltage is needed to work the device. On the board of the amplifier/tuner is a device that converts AC to DC voltage called a bridge rectifier.

Lastly, I loosely filled the speaker cabinet with polyfill which should improve the sound by damping the sound (half of it) that comes out of the back of the woofer.

Below is a photo I made of the floor radio "in situ" in the corner of the listening room. I'm toying with selling the rest of the radios in the collection as I only used one on Sunday nights listening to old time radio on WAMU 88.5 FM in Washington, D.C.

Thanks for looking,

Scott