I've actually rebuilt one of these Aeolean player stacks, but I'm cured since. Aversion therapy works. Though there was crude junk back there too, the decent quality old (real) players of the 1920s were decently, sometimes marvelously engineered, possessed of leather valve seats, and assembled with real attention given to tolerances and function. Leather is an ideal valve material, as it conforms to the valve seat after a short while, and is a good tight seal for many years afterward without needing elevated pressures to achieve it. Building player stacks through the 20s was relatively expensive, and demanded a trained work force capable of doing skilled close tolerance work and caring about doing so. The resurrection of the player by Aeolian came with a different set of priorities. The valves, for instance, were three stacked injection molded plastic pieces, held together by what appears to be a plastic/acetone glue, slavered on with minimal care, and a stamped neoprene disc as a valve. Neoprene doesn't compact like leather and improve the seal over time. It remains as un-flat as it was, requiring high pressure levels to seat with each stroke, and becoming worse through the years as the material stiffens with age. The valve gap, unlike the old decent quality players, is whatever results when the valve is assembled, and tends to be overly wide. The result is that they are very wasteful of available vacuum, and can be heard to gasp and pop as the player is used. Aeolian's basic approach was to make a player as cheaply as possible that could be put together by minimum wage warm bodies with absolutely minimal training, and produce a mechanism that was cheap enough to be disposable, requiring virtually no QC during the assembly, that finally worked at a just barely adequate level as a toy for the consumer market at the price it cost. As an example of industrial design of a low end product, it's excellent. As a player, they're adequate for most people, who don't know the difference. For someone who's rebuilt real players, and seen them operate at vacuum levels under 4" (water), they're total junk. Ron N
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