Universal Players

[Ron Nossaman]

I remember a few things about these player shaped objects too. The pianos
were pretty awful, and about 6" ("universally") shorter than the case
dimensions would seem to indicate. It was pretty tough to get a tuning
hammer past the spool box to tune them, as I recall, and it was often hard
to tell that you HAD tuned them when you were done except for the blood on
your elbow and forearm from the sharp corners of the aluminum spool box. The
player mechanism was super tight, and that was the selling point. The
trade-offs in design features that made these systems so tight didn't strike
me as that good a deal. The aluminum stack used polyurathane pouches, which
are wonderfully air tight, and offer very close bleed and valve repetition
rate control at very light vacuum levels, but tended to rot and leak
quickly. The valves were neoprene, which hardens and warps with age, making
them considerably shorter lived than a good leather faced valve. The roll
drive motor was electric, which accounted for quite a bit of the apparent
vacuum efficiency of the system, and also meant that you still couldn't play
the player without power. It wasn't an entirely pneumatic system. The drive
motors also seemed to require occasional visits from a tech to tighten set
screws, make adjustments, and generally coax them back to function. The
automatic tracker valve system consisted of a couple of sequential cutout
pouches controlling a constant leakage bleed override system to work the
tracker pneumatic(s?). Not too efficient or dependable, but extremely cheap
and easy to manufacture, and actually, kind of clever. It also seems to me
that there was a problem with the sustain pneumatic design, but it seems to
have evaporated from memory. 

Bottom line is that they were players, about like the Kimballs and
Wurlitzers with the slug and leaf switch tracker bar and solenoid action
were players. I don't miss them a bit.

 Ron