RETRO TUNES

SIDE HUSTLE SPINS OUTTHE BEST WAYTO LISTEN TO NEWMUSIC

A passion for restoration breathes new life into vintage radio players, finds Sarah Heeringa.

Streaming tracks from your smartphone is all well and good, but for superior sound quality, nothing beats hearing your favourite tunes played through the vibrating valves of a remodelled vintage radio.

Alister Ramsey, of Retro Radios, saves old radios and stereograms from being dumped, transforming them into objects of desire.

While some reworked radios have their “guts ripped out” and replaced with a new stereo system, Ramsey’s painstaking approach uses the original parts, effectively turning the old radio into valvepowered Bluetooth speakers. “It delivers the best of both worlds: The warm, rounded sound of a valve radio and the versatility of being able to connect with it however you want,” says Ramsey.

Prices vary – compact radios can be bought for between $400 and $500. Some of the bigger models sell in the thousands. One example; a beautiful old Philips radiogram sold for $3500 at Auckland’s Very Vintage Day Out.

Ramsey was a Dannevirke-based homeschooling dad who started doing up old radios in his spare time, as his children reached the end of their schooling. He’d studied woodworking years before at teachers’ college, and had grown up with old radios and related gadgets thanks to his own dad’s hobby as a ham radio operator.

Nine years ago, his side hustle got a boost from the Dannevirke council’s business hub. Newly opened, the hub’s team were looking for small, local businesses to support. With their encouragement, Ramsey entered Innovate, a Palmerston North-based entrepreneurial competition run for the past decade in Manawatū. He reached the finals of the programme, receiving 12 weeks of business mentorship.

Initially, Ramsey scouted for radios to be fixed up and on-sold at vintage markets. Things went quiet during the pandemic, but since then word has got out, and the radios “come out of the woodwork”, as well as from direct commissions.

People often get in contact when downsizing or after someone’s dad has died or moved into a rest home,

and there’s a shed to clear out. Some collectors can have 100 radios tucked away.

It’s an exacting craft, where looks can be deceptive. Some old radios are covered in bird poop and “all sorts of right dodgy-looking material”.

By the time they reach him the radios generally don’t work. Ramsey recommends not plugging old radios in, or trying to turn them on, because this can cause damage. He prefers to “bring them up slowly”. Some are beyond repair.

The first thing Ramsey checks is that the radios won’t blow up if plugged in. A “live chassis” means that once switched on they can also deliver an electric shock. “It was the old way they used to design them, that was perfectly fine back in the 50s and 60s, but now they’re not safe.’’

Radio cabinets are a place to stash things, and they can be a treasure trove of forgotten family photos, old newspaper cuttings and toys hidden inside.

Any such items are returned to the owners. (One illegal-looking item was destroyed.)

The radios are restored inside and out, so they’re working properly as a valve radio, Ramsey explains. “Then we do a little bit of trickery inside and fit an auxiliary input that cuts out the old radio receiver section and uses the valve amplifier. We add a Bluetooth receiver to that.”

That way you can play whatever you music you want, but as it feeds through the valve, you can control volume and tone using the radio’s original dials. More importantly, you get the “curved” valve sound rather than a “more pointy” transistor radio or amplifier sound.

Ramsey says the work is very much a learning curve. “I have an old chap who knows more about valve radios than I’ll ever know, I can go to for help when stuck with a big problem.”

The oldest piece Ramsey has worked on is a 100-year-old stereo gramophone that came from a silent movie theatre in Nūhaka, in northern Hawke’s Bay.

Back in 1923, records were made of shaleck, a heavy and brittle substance. The player’s steel needles came in little tins of a hundred at a time, because the gramophone used two needles at a time and they needed to be replaced each time a record was played.

Silenced by time and changing technology, the device has now been brought back to life with Bluetooth.