A few weeks ago esteeemed brother extraordinaire Redbenjoe PM'd me regarding an opportunity to take one of his beloved DiscoLites off his hands.
Bargains were made, deals were struck and soon enough I had a wonderful DiscoLite on my doorstep! Thank you VERY much Ira!!
This radio needed a bit of work and had a few things I needed to do to get her all up to snuff. The list was:
- 11 LED's needed replacing
- Speakers needed cleaning/painting
- Tuning knob and cassette deck keys refinishing
- Speaker grills de-rusted and repainted
On top of this there was some extra stuff I wanted to do, namely put gold around the speaker rims. As Ira says, this is the Stealth Model of the DiscoLite
and I embraced the challenge to get the gold back on her rims as this model was entirely black around the speakers. I also replaced the 'tweeters' in her with real ones that are actually audible.
Most of the work wasn't hard, but the replacing LED's and improving on some of the electronics inside took more time and patience. The wire loom that joins the
two separate speaker LED PCB boards was reconstructed twice, once to replace the original one that was failing and another time to make it a much more durable connection. It was also required to fix an issue we managed to inflict upon the poor radio when one of the lines was accidentally bridged, making the
LED patterns go a bit screwy. This was all fixed thankfully, about one third by me and two thirds by my good friend who's a long suffering solderer who's very familiar with this kind of territory and has the correct equipment for the job.
This radio is a right *insert harshest expletive you can think of* to work on in regards to the LED's, the decks and everything else is awesome and makes sense to work on, but those LEDs are not for the feint of heart or patience to deal with. I don't know how many times tracks lifted that then needed to be joined by extra pieces of wire. Wires fall off just from slight movement and tracks can be very close together. Be prepared to do as much fixing from accidents you create along the way to fixing the ones you are attempting to work on!
So the last couple of weeks has been PACKED with trials and tribulations over this wonderous machine. Apart from the electronic side the cosmetic work regarding the speaker trims took 3 different attempts and tens of hours spent working out how to do them and then putting it into practice. I wanted to match the already gold speaker/LED trims and it became a battle trying do this accurately. After visitng a couple of craft shops half a dozen times and experimenting with lots of different finishes and techniques I found that a foil from one shop matched the existing gold about 90% closely and was reasonably easy to work.
Seven hours of cutting, hole punching and glueing later she started looking RIGHT.
I know this radio gets a pretty bad rap for sound, and I was preparing myself for something that sounded very average but I was very, very surprised with the DiscoLite's sound (especially after replacing the tweeters). Theres a nice amount of bass and giving her proper tweeters allows for some very nice stereo separation. The case is actually quite narrow depth wise, and with the wacky dustcap lights it's going to be an uphill battle for her to sound decent but I've been really loving her sound-personality. The last couple of weeks I've cranked every style of music I've got through her. She's definitely a funk/disco/electro box. I've found mid 80s italo-disco to match her sound PERFECTLY, like she was designed from the ground up for that style. Rock and guitar stuff sound very, very flat, but most anything with accentuated bass seems to produce a lovely, well balanced sound.
I think some of the misconceptions about the sound of the DiscoLite have come from people using them in 240v mode on 110v power, the switch in the back isn't hard to move and when I set mine to 240v and ran her on my 110v stepdown she sounded completely flat, volume-less and generally awful. Maybe I've not got an audiophile ear, but I've a LOT worse sounding boxes than this in my collection that have been widely regarded on here as being 'ok' to 'good' sounding. Even one of my audiophile mates stopped giggling at my DiscoLite when he finally got to hear her!
One more note before I get to the photos and video; I LOVE this box. Before I got one I wasn't sure about them at all and thought it might just be all hype and musicvideo brainwashing, but genuinely, this ghettoblaster is the ATOM BOMB of blasters for pure entertainment value. I can spend hours watching and listening to my music on her, the novelty doesn't wear off. I've even made a DiscoLite playlist I've recorded to tape that delivers the most audio/visual entertainment song for song. There's no other portable stereo like the DiscoLite and if any of you have the opportunity to get one without having experiencing one first hand I highly, highly recommend you get ON it, asap! (Just make sure all the LEDs are working!!)
Now, on with the show!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDDPvSwN83Y
Rock On.
Bargains were made, deals were struck and soon enough I had a wonderful DiscoLite on my doorstep! Thank you VERY much Ira!!
This radio needed a bit of work and had a few things I needed to do to get her all up to snuff. The list was:
- 11 LED's needed replacing
- Speakers needed cleaning/painting
- Tuning knob and cassette deck keys refinishing
- Speaker grills de-rusted and repainted
On top of this there was some extra stuff I wanted to do, namely put gold around the speaker rims. As Ira says, this is the Stealth Model of the DiscoLite
and I embraced the challenge to get the gold back on her rims as this model was entirely black around the speakers. I also replaced the 'tweeters' in her with real ones that are actually audible.
Most of the work wasn't hard, but the replacing LED's and improving on some of the electronics inside took more time and patience. The wire loom that joins the
two separate speaker LED PCB boards was reconstructed twice, once to replace the original one that was failing and another time to make it a much more durable connection. It was also required to fix an issue we managed to inflict upon the poor radio when one of the lines was accidentally bridged, making the
LED patterns go a bit screwy. This was all fixed thankfully, about one third by me and two thirds by my good friend who's a long suffering solderer who's very familiar with this kind of territory and has the correct equipment for the job.
This radio is a right *insert harshest expletive you can think of* to work on in regards to the LED's, the decks and everything else is awesome and makes sense to work on, but those LEDs are not for the feint of heart or patience to deal with. I don't know how many times tracks lifted that then needed to be joined by extra pieces of wire. Wires fall off just from slight movement and tracks can be very close together. Be prepared to do as much fixing from accidents you create along the way to fixing the ones you are attempting to work on!
So the last couple of weeks has been PACKED with trials and tribulations over this wonderous machine. Apart from the electronic side the cosmetic work regarding the speaker trims took 3 different attempts and tens of hours spent working out how to do them and then putting it into practice. I wanted to match the already gold speaker/LED trims and it became a battle trying do this accurately. After visitng a couple of craft shops half a dozen times and experimenting with lots of different finishes and techniques I found that a foil from one shop matched the existing gold about 90% closely and was reasonably easy to work.
Seven hours of cutting, hole punching and glueing later she started looking RIGHT.
I know this radio gets a pretty bad rap for sound, and I was preparing myself for something that sounded very average but I was very, very surprised with the DiscoLite's sound (especially after replacing the tweeters). Theres a nice amount of bass and giving her proper tweeters allows for some very nice stereo separation. The case is actually quite narrow depth wise, and with the wacky dustcap lights it's going to be an uphill battle for her to sound decent but I've been really loving her sound-personality. The last couple of weeks I've cranked every style of music I've got through her. She's definitely a funk/disco/electro box. I've found mid 80s italo-disco to match her sound PERFECTLY, like she was designed from the ground up for that style. Rock and guitar stuff sound very, very flat, but most anything with accentuated bass seems to produce a lovely, well balanced sound.
I think some of the misconceptions about the sound of the DiscoLite have come from people using them in 240v mode on 110v power, the switch in the back isn't hard to move and when I set mine to 240v and ran her on my 110v stepdown she sounded completely flat, volume-less and generally awful. Maybe I've not got an audiophile ear, but I've a LOT worse sounding boxes than this in my collection that have been widely regarded on here as being 'ok' to 'good' sounding. Even one of my audiophile mates stopped giggling at my DiscoLite when he finally got to hear her!
One more note before I get to the photos and video; I LOVE this box. Before I got one I wasn't sure about them at all and thought it might just be all hype and musicvideo brainwashing, but genuinely, this ghettoblaster is the ATOM BOMB of blasters for pure entertainment value. I can spend hours watching and listening to my music on her, the novelty doesn't wear off. I've even made a DiscoLite playlist I've recorded to tape that delivers the most audio/visual entertainment song for song. There's no other portable stereo like the DiscoLite and if any of you have the opportunity to get one without having experiencing one first hand I highly, highly recommend you get ON it, asap! (Just make sure all the LEDs are working!!)
Now, on with the show!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDDPvSwN83Y
Rock On.
Sounds like that was a typical Ira POS before you got it. 
)
