Blue Califone 1430K record player
 

Here's a Califone 1430K school record player from '77 that I just received as a result of an ebay purchase. Despite a lousy packing job, it arrived undamaged (at least cosmetically). From my brief testing; it's going to need a full overhaul that will involve the drive mechanism, replacing the damaged 89T powerpoint cartridge holder (flip lever broken off), and replacing the light in the tonearm. I'm trying to decide if I want to go with another 89T cartridge or use something like a Pfanstiehl P228.

One good thing is that the case is in nice shape and not scribbled all over, like so many of these school record players are.

I remember this exact model from elementary school, along with the older Rheem-Califone (some tubed) units.

http://i538.photobucket.com/albums/f...ps285950e1.jpg

Nice catch.

I remember Califones from school too. I even owned one. My dad a was a school custodian and a couple were being thrown out. He took two home for me.

Mine was grey and had a red Califone name on the front. The C was into the speaker on the front. I loved it. Sure wish I still had it.

When I had my retail shop, I repaired many of those things at a religious school, a steady customer. They had many models, plus sound systems, projectors, and other stuff. At the time, maybe 1974, parts were still easy enough to get.

Today, Califone offers no parts support for any of these discontinued models. It seems that the parts are now discontinued when a product is discontinued. Fortunately, most of what fails on these units consist of generic parts that can be obtained from other sources.

Damn I just donated one of those to Goodwill really recently. I always hate getting rid of stuff but have decided to empty the house out a bit... it's amazing how much accumulates over years of hobby acquisitions. It's a good solid player but nothing sexy, and the performance is OK but nothing outstanding. The agricultural grade tonearm is what did it in for me, I just refuse to let my records be abused like that.

As far as sound quality, Audiotronics and Newcomb units seem to be the best.

I remember there being two great sounding califone models from that era... one looked similar to the one you bought, but the lid contained a 12" speaker. The other was the stereo model, with a sloped control panel and two 6x9 speakers that buckled together to form the lid.

I had a flat control panel stereo version that was a real nice sounding unit.

The flat control panel stereo version was in the music room of my middle school and it sounded nice. One day, our music teacher allowed us to bring in records and tapes to play in class. My choice was a 78 rpm record from the '40's. I'll bet that was the only time that this record player had been played at 78 rpm.

I remember bringing 45s to school to play, but never a 78... at the time they also had a lot of EIKI and Bell & Howell cassette players - great big ones with a decent amplifier in them. And I also caught the tail end of 16mm films as an instructional tool... being in Canada a lot of them were national film board produced documentaries, and the occasional movie. Seeing a 16mm film projected on a large screen was so superior to the crappy VCRs and TVs that replaced them, it was probably a component of my early education that newer doesn't always equal better.

The public school, I first attended, still used wind-up Victrolas, in the lower grades.
I also remember, the records only had one side. They were all Sousa marching songs.
This was in the late 40's, early 50's.

The only 16mm film I remember was "Ruldolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" that they would show every year, just before we let out for Christmas break. Everything else was on 23" tube-type RCA color TV's and U-matic tape machines on roll-around carts. When I was in the 4th or 5th grade, the school finally obtained a VHS machine. Oh, the library had one of those new 25" solid state Zenith's with the green LED channel readout and pull-on/volume knob.

During 7th grade, all the schools got the wall mounted 19" Magnavox "channel one" TV's and an elaborate CCTV system in the library that pretty much did away with most of the big roll around TV's.

We did have filmstrips and I remember a Wollensak reel-to-reel player being used a time or two during highschool.

I graduated high school in 96... I think the public school board did away with the central film library in about 93 or 94, but
They had an enormous collection of 16mm movies they would loan out to individual schools who requested them. I never saw umatic, but lots of late 70s VHS machines, some so old to have rotary tuners,
And horribly cheap 20-27 inch RCA tvs... The linear sound track through a cheap oval speaker filling a whole classroom with hissy distorted sound was memorable
For how awful it was

Of the school phonos, VM is my favorite of them. Those tracked at lighter weights, sounded good, and were gentle on records. Only their cheapest was less than decent. I like Newcomb phonos and better Audiotronics and Califones.

I remember Newcomb and V-M players from elementary and middle school, mostly because they sounded better than my 1973 GE plastic clamshell. Not a close'n'play

It was a hard thing to admit, that my school had some better equipment than I did.

Those classroom portable school platters seemed to sound good, especially when the platter in the cafetorium/stage or gym system played through narrow-band horn speakers intended for speech:boring:, making anything sound awful!

Are any of the VM school record players stereo models?

I never knew anything about tracking force before coming to this board, I certainly don't want that harm any records that I might be playing or just testing. The only record I have right now is that complimentary record that came with Admiral color TVs at one time. I have no record player, so no idea if there are any skips.

Most school age children only had simple kiddie record players. Manual turntables and one tube or low power solid state amplifiers. When they got a little older, maybe they got an inexpensive portable stereo, such as the GE offerings.
The schools had equipment specified by the school board and were usually a lot more expensive than the consumer models. The amplifiers had to be a lot more powerful, for large areas. :yes:

I agree that the VM AV models were a cut above most others, the turntable
drive was superior and they had much better tonearms and cartridges.
They made several Stereo models, the 296 is one that comes to mind.

Most of the VM models that I've seen had a "stripped down" changer platform that worked well. I had such a solid state VM school record player that had a powerpoint 89T cartridge in it; but, I don't know if it was original to the player.

yes, most the AV VM's used a modified manual version of their changer,
a few models even added variable speed control.

A few of the lower price VM AV models used the sound flo or power point
cartridge but most used the excellent Euphonics, by the late 60's they
were using Tetrads.

By the time I was 9 years old, I had superior gear to school phonos however. I had a Dynakit Stereo 70 power amp, a Dynakit PAS3X preamplifier, Dynaco A 25 speakers, a HH ScottKit tuner SS based version of the 312D, and a AR XA91. Bought with my first radio station paycheck as a young part time engineer assistant/DJ. I built the kits too, had a great time doing it.

And except for the very cheapest model, or two. All the VM Classroom phonos are of excellent quality in their build and sound. And their adapted changer mechanism as a single play is gentle to records and works great.

This thread is so interesting that I had to add my two cents.

I was an AV guy in high school and got to use and figure out all that great old equipment. Bell and Howells, Califones, Beselers, DuKanes, Audiotronics, Wollensaks and even a Webcor reel-to-reel. I worked in the high school media center for two years during study hall and went on to repair that equipment as a career after college. First in my own business and then for the school system as their first repair technician.

I don't think they ever threw anything away at my high school. They still had IBM electrics from the early 1950s when the school was built, and this was 1975-76. And they still worked great, but nobody wanted to use them but me.

I too remember the bad sound from a tinny little speaker sometimes. I also remember seeing 16mm projectors that were rarely used because the Bell and Howells threaded automatically and they were on carts that went out into the classrooms. Those old projectors just sat in the corner most of the time.

We had a rather temperamental media lady and she must have gotten even with our French teacher one day--who knows, maybe she put in a last-minute request? I walked into the classroom one day to discover the RCA 16mm projector set up and ready to show a film.

It was a National Geographic film, with that wonderful theme song at the first. That RCA projector had a separate speaker (with a red RCA logo in a metal grille) and it was working perfectly. Such wonderful sound! I was awestruck. It actually had bass. I've never forgotten that moment in time. A projector from the 1950s working perfectly in the 1970s and better than the new projectors too.

Our science teacher, who was more like a mad scientist, had a brown Bell and Howell 16mm with a door on the side. He was the only teacher who would put up with threading it. I learned how to thread all of them and that was fun. He also had a huge blue overhead projector.

It's amazing how easy to service all that old equipment was. I could figure out how to repair it even as a high school kid.

I've seen some projectors that actually had a built-in record player. My school district had tons of old equipment; but, in the early 2000's, they came into some money that allowed them to come into the 21st century and the old stuff went to auction, with much of it going to the dump when no one bought it.

I was starting the 4th grade- in 1966- when they put TVs in all the classrooms. They all tuned the local cable channel system's offerings. Back then, SOMETIMES, the teacher would turn on the TV & we'd watch a Gemini taking off...IIRC, the TVs were 23-24" B/W-Don't remember the brand. They were STILL THERE in the mid/late Eighties..

My junior high school was built in 1967 and it had those same TVs. They were 23" GE B&W with light gray metal cabinets and they were usually on tall carts that tilted them down a little. I started working for the same school system in 1985 and they were still there, but weren't used very much, so they all still worked fine, or all the ones I ever checked did. They were eventually sold at auction like everything else.

That school didn't have school-wide cable or MATV until Channel One came through in the 1990s, so we never watched anything live that I recall. If we did, it was with rabbit ears.

During the '80's, my elementary school had 2 or 3 23" RCA tube color TV's with the jack panel on the rear of the set (CTC39 "mural TV"), sitting on a roll around metal cart and connected to a Sony U-matic tape machine. Later, they got a standard VCR to go along with the U-matic machine. The only newer TV was a 25" Zenith "custom series" that was in the library. If a teacher wanted the TV, he/she had to check it out in advance.

In late '89-early '90, the schools got channel one; so, most every classroom got a 19" Magnavox wall mounted TV and there was a CCTV system in the library. So, that pretty much did away with the roll around TV's. For some reason, my 10th grade biology class didn't get a TV mounted in the room; so, it still had one of those RCA tube sets in there that was just barely making it by the early-to-mid '90's.

I remember they had record players like that in elementary school, but don't remember what models or makes they were. We used to have to square dance to square dance music during PE time. We also watched film projectors, (probably were 16mm), that had sound, and then the schools got some B&W RCA TVs on carts, which received UHF, so we could watch the one educational channel available at that time in Omaha. I guess I was jealous, those TVs could get a channel that I couldn't get at home. I also remember one time we were going to watch something on TV at school and the set wouldn't come on, and my teacher had no idea what to do, so I suggested she push the red button on the back (circuit breaker) and the set came on. I was either in 5th or 6th grade.

We were talking about this in another thread. My only beef with that arm was since it was meant for a changer originally, the arm slopes downward so the VTA is incorrect. I wish there was a way to flatten the arm.

Still I remember playing Billie Jean off of Jacko's Thrilller LP on the 275/AV (pretty sure that was the one with Volume and Tone on the front of the case with no label). It sounded terrific.

Wow .Those Califone's give me old 1960's and 70's classroom memories along with B&H 16mm film projectors.

For videotape a/v equipment .They had 1/2 inch Panasonic's and later with Sony Umatic machines.

Probably now all the school systems got rid of them which they probably started dumping them in the early 1980's for updated machines until CDs came out.
With luck some might have them in their cold storage area.

I had better than the schools did when I was 9 years old, and began my first broadcast job. I had a Dynakit Stereo 70 power amplifier, a Dynakit PAS 3-X Stereo preamplifier, A HH ScottKit LT 112-B FM tuner, an AR XA turntable with Shure M 75 EJ cartridge, and a pair of Dynaco A 25 loudspeakers. My first broadcast station paycheck paid for this working part time, I was a substitute announcer, assistant to the chief engineer (who specialized then in studio equipment maintenance on AM/FM equipment and did transmitters when necessary).