Acousticon Radio Unit
The Acousticon Radio Unit was manufactured by the General
Acoustic Company, which later became Dictograph Products, Inc. of New
York, NY some time between 1927 and 1932.
This assistive listening device let a hard of hearing person listen
to a radio via headphones, a receiver or a bone conduction transducer
while the rest of the family listened to the radio via its loudspeaker.
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The Acousticon Radio Unit was "adaptable to all types of radio sets"
because of its ingenious design. You didn't have to modify the radio
itself. All you needed to do was unplug the pre-amplifier tube, plug
in the adapter socket (shown right) and plug the tube back into the top
of the adapter socket.
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Top view of the Acousticon Radio Unit adapter socket. You plugged the
tube you removed in the step above back into this socket. The adapter
socket had a 11˝" cord with an attached plug on it that hung down
outside of the radio.
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The receptacle (socket) from the adapter socket (left) hung outside of
the radio ready for use. To use the Acousticon Radio Unit, the person
simply plugged it into this receptacle.
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The tube at the right housed the impedance-matching transformer and a
capacitor. The screw-eye (left end) let you hang this tube near the
radio. (The cord from the plug to this tube was 12" long.) This tube
measured 1⅝" in diameter by 4⅞" long. It was relatively heavy weighing
just over half a pound.
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A cord 19' 3" long connected the volume control (right) to the above
tube. The volume control of the Acousticon Radio Unit shared the
same fancy "Silver Anniversary" design on its volume control as did the
Acousticon Model 28 carbon hearing aid.
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Side view of the Acousticon Radio Unit showing the on-off/volume
control slider. (Loud was to the left and soft and off to the right.)
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View of the Acousticon Radio Unit volume control (bottom left), 24"cord
and bone conductor transducer (top center). Missing is the headband to
hold the bone conductor transducer tight to the listener's head. The
transducer rested on the bone behind the ear. Instead of the bone
conductor transducer, you could also use either the same headphone or
receiver and ear mold as was used on the
Acousticon
Model 28 hearing aid. |
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The cord connecting the Acousticon Radio Unit volume control to the
bone conduction transducer had two sizes of pins. The large pins plugged
into the volume control (left), and the small pins into the bone
conduction transducer (right). The pins at each end
were also of unequal diameters so you couldn't plug them in backwards,
thus preserving proper polarity. Some of the Acousticon receivers were
hard wired, but some of them had sockets that also fit this pin
configuration. |
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Outside view of the original box for the Acousticon Radio Unit.
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