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HMV Star

Aha the HMV star!

HMV India had a whole lot of them around then. Some even had a radio (Tuner) built in.

The body was actually made of wood and lined with rexin. Quite fine piece of workmanship actually. The turntable (record player) platter and chassis was made of some sort of AL alloy. It had an AC motor, the winding of which also provided voltage taps for the amplifier section. So when you have a liberal amount of a very funny rumblining type of AC hum being reproduced faithfully by the amp. Tonearm was built to last. It would have a high output Crystal stylus. You needed to flip yej stylus to play 45RPM and the new fangled 33RPM “LP�s. The TT had additional speeds of 16RPM and 78RPM so that your grandpa didn’t miss out on those Bade Ghulam Ali records.

The amp was a simple transistorized contraption, employing a Push Pull pair of AD178 and AD179 Germanium transistor giving approx 1 watts. The “speaker box� was actually the lid of the turntable, which would have a 3� X 5� elliptical driver.

The above was the standard plot, which would fit most of the HMV record players of the time. These were produced around 60’s till about mid 70’s in there Dumdum plant near Calcutta.

Ashok Satpathy

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