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Thursday, December 21, 2023

Arcane Knowledge


1957 Telefunken Opus 7 Repair & Bluetooth Mod
Mend It Mark

This video is almost an hour long, but he doesn't waste any time, it's all action. The radio is dang near as old as I am. It predates PCBs (printed circuit boards). And where did he find a schematic? Well, it's a German radio, and the Germans are known for being organized so I guess that's not too surprising.

He plays fast and loose with that soldering iron, but being as this thing is going to be sitting on a table in somebody's house and not being vibrated to death in an airplane I suppose it's good enough.

Inserting that Bluetooth module into the radio's circuit was real wizardry.

I do wonder that he didn't replace the speakers. Speakers that old have got to be junk, but maybe the Germans used better material for the speaker cones than the flimsy paper we used in our consumer radios.

I wonder how many people have the knowledge and skills to perform this kind of repair. Not many I suspect. Maybe one in a million? That would still amount to 7,000 people worldwide, and most of them would be concentrated in the northern hemisphere. I was going to say the West, but Russia probably has an outsize grasp of arcane knowledge.

Via Posthip Scott

Old radios have appeared here and here and here.

1 comment:

AndrewP said...

Very satisfying. I am surprised that he didnt find any knackered valves,
although perhaps thatvmagic-eye could be counted as one.