Rare Telefunken Stereo Studio RC 1880 found me!

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dubout

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Recently a good friend revealed to me that his father was Head of Design at Telefunken in the 80ies and that he has something that might be interesting for me. I was thrilled and when we got there, my friend took me into a small shed where we found a long abandoned Telefunken RC 1880. It was in a pitiful state: broken antenna, the eject button and cassette window taped, the cabinet damaged by heat (lightbulb that got too close?!), rusty speaker grills and dust and spider webs from ages.

It took me a few hours but I took it all apart, gave it a bath, glued and rebelted it and voilà: an elegant designed machine came to light!

It is the smallest 3 piece I own and it has an impressive sound not only for it's size! It can get pretty loud and has a warm bass that goes well deep which makes it possible to really enjoy even electronic music. I have to mention that the dustcaps of the tweeters are only dummies because underneath there are piezo tweeters. But that doesn't affect the sound in a bad way, the unit sounds fantastic!

This model seems to be similar to the Telefunken RC 880, at least from the few pictures I found I can't tell any difference. Maybe it has something to do with collecting societies like GEMA or BIEM, maybe they were for different markets like for example the Telefunken HP-800 / HP-1800S? But as there aren't many pictures and even less info to be found online I thought some of you might enjoy a few pictures.

Box1.jpgBox2.jpgBox3.jpg

My friends father also told me that he has a prototype somewhere but he didn't even show it to me ... next time I will be a little more persistent! :w00t:
 
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mudman

Member (SA)
Cool boombox! I'd be all over that friend's dad for inside info, especially for a design guy, they're pretty rare to run into and for some reason never show up on any forums, except the Hitichi Guy that showed up a decade or so ago. Telefunken and the other German manufacturers had some great units with amazing style, if would be interesting to hear the background story.
 
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dubout

Member (SA)
Thanks mudman! Well, maybe the design guys are more into aesthetics than into how the stuff actually works. This guy at least. His whole house is covered in Bauhaus design and furniture. He is more of an artist with his own mind. I wouldn't be surprised if the backstory to this design was 'I just thought it looked cool :)'

I showed him another Telefunken box from 1982. The backstory to that one? 'A colleague designed it. We took a JVC and rebuilt it.' :lol: :lol:
 

mudman

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There are two types of industrial designers, some have art degrees and some have science degrees with engineering, they actually know if the "design" will work with existing mechanics. At the end of the day they both can come up with some amazing products.
 
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