Another talking book record player - model AE5A

[radiotvnut]

As some of you know, I have a fairly decent sized collection of these types of players. Here's an early solid state machine, model AE5A, from '69. This model, along with the similar AE5 from '68, superceded the wooden grey cased tube models.

For those who don't know, this plays 8, 16, and 33 rpm records and was loaned to blind & physically handicapped persons, who could not easily read standard print, for the purpose of playing special slow speed TB records provided by the library of congress.

These were superceded by the 4-track cassette players and the tapes have been superceded by digital cartridges; so, these record players are highly obsolete now unless you have a bunch of old TB records. However, TB records were made until the end of 2000 and I remember quite well the old green A79 and beige A77 record players that several of my visually impaired friends had during the '80's and early '90's (even though I'm not crazy about that series of machines). Still, my favorite machines are the old wooden tube jobs. The later solid state ones didn't have much volume and they sounded tinny.

Here's a video I made of this machine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KphvewckxyE