This Clever Little Upgrade Turns Your Vintage Gramophone Into a Working Bluetooth Speaker

Maker JGJMatt has designed a device that turns any Edison-style gramophone into a working Bluetooth speaker — by sitting under the stylus.

"I have an obsession with vintage audio and unfortunately with my newest acquisition, a cabinet style Edison gramophone I've come to a realization that they take up a LOT of space for something that can't get used daily," JGJMatt explains of the project's inspiration. "That was until I came across an image of a very unusual vintage gadget called the Victor Dulce-Tone Radio Talking Machine… THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!"

The predecessor to the modern record player and successor to Edison's wax-cylinder phonograph, the gramophone is a mechanical musical playback device which typically deploys clockwork to rotate a grooved disc to move a stylus that reads said groove — amplifying those tiny movements through a large horn into recognizable, if scratchy, music.

The Victor Dulce-Tone Radio Talking Machine, meanwhile, was a compact radio receiver that lacked its own recognizable speaker — instead using what is, effectively, a tiny speaker driver on which the stylus would sit to turn any gramophone into a working radio. "Unfortunately," JGJMatt notes, "these 'direct driver' devices tended to perform rather poorly and were only produced for a few years making them pretty hard to find these days."

JGJMatt's take on the Radio Talking Machine is a more modern affair, but works in the same way: the basic radio receiver is gone, replaced by an off-the-shelf low-cost Bluetooth radio module. Power is provided via a compact lithium-ion battery, with a 3D-printed shell keeping everything neat and tidy. The driver is assembled from a sliced-up speaker, and the housing is designed like the Victor device of old: to host the gramophone stylus and to employ it as a passive amplifier for any Bluetooth-capable audio device.

"I can now get to listen to my entire Spotify playlist while still retaining that unique passive horn signature sound," JGJMatt says of the finished project. "Bet you never thought you'd see the day Cardi B plays on the gramophone!"

The project is documented in full, including wiring diagram and STL files for the housing, on Instructables.