Califone 1845K professional dance turntable

[radiotvnut]

Here's a Califone model 1845 professional dance turntable from 1980. It's a 4-speed unit with pitch control and a microphone input, along with a 12" speaker in the lid.

It's obvious that someone replaced some burned resistors before I got it and it also seems that they didn't find what was causing the resistors to burn. I have not done any troubleshooting yet; but, from the loud hum that I'm getting, I suspect that the output transistors are shorted (TO3 cased darlingtons).

Once I get it operational, I'll need to do something about that patch of rust on the motorboard. I'll probably need to sand it down and repaint that area.

I wish this unit had the longer tonearm for playing 16" records. The older versions had a longer tonearm; but, I guess that no one needed to play 16" records by the time this unit was made.

[JBL GUY]

I like it!

Thanks for the picture.

[rca2000]

Could you show a picture of the amp? Would like to see it--and how much sinking it has , etc.

[KentTeffeteller]

This is interesting. On the low end of the market they aimed at, decent for what it is. Hilton aimed at the Square dancers and folk dance market, there was another minor player or two, and there was also Newcomb in between. Some school systems would have also used these for PE classes. Band and serious music classes usually avoided this type gear, and usually used better grade separate component HiFi in quite a few school systems and often as not in universities.

[radiotvnut]

During my school years, 99% of the record players that I saw were mono Califone models. The one exception is the Califone 1130K stereo model that had two 6"X9" speakers and was in the music room of my middle school. It sounded decent for what it was; but, not hi-fi by any means.

In college, I took music appreciation as an elective and there was a component style system with a middle of the road turntable connected to it. I don't recall the turntable ever being used because by the time I was there, most everything was on CD.