{"id":8827,"date":"2026-01-24T17:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T15:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/?p=8827"},"modified":"2026-01-24T17:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T15:13:08","slug":"symphonola-restoration-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/2026\/01\/24\/symphonola-restoration-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Symphonola Restoration: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>When I was growing up in Newfoundland, we had an old gramophone in our basement that I was told, came from my great-grandfather&#8217;s house. That was about 50 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On a recent trip home from Denmark, I dismantled it and brought it back with me, with a plan to restore it. The first step was to find out what, exactly, it is, since I will have to buy some replacements for some broken or missing pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It appears to be a &#8220;Junior&#8221; model from a company called the Canadian Symphonola Co., Limited, which had a factory and headquarters at 31-37 Brock Avenue, Toronto. <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-medium\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"257\" src=\"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_01-300x257.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8828\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_01-300x257.png 300w, http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_01-1024x878.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_01-768x659.png 768w, http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_01.png 1082w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>This advertisement for the Junior is from the Canadian Music Trades Journal in August, 1917. Mine is the Fumed Oak variant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One interesting thing that I&#8217;ve come across when digging into this was this advertisement from the Toronto Daily Star in December, 1917.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"574\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_02-574x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-8829\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_02-574x1024.jpeg 574w, http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_02-168x300.jpeg 168w, http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/symphonola_02.jpeg 669w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 574px) 100vw, 574px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>The >100-year old text is weirdly familiar in these times of rather unstable international relationships. History has a tendency to rhyme. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For more information about the Symphonola company, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.capsnews.org\/capp\/symphonola\/symphonola.html\">this page<\/a> at capsnews.org is a great resource. (it&#8217;s also where I found those two screenshots above&#8230;)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was growing up in Newfoundland, we had an old gramophone in our basement that I was told, came from my great-grandfather&#8217;s house. That was about 50 years ago. On a recent trip home from Denmark, I dismantled it and brought it back with me, with a plan to restore it. The first step [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,25,72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-history","category-vinyl"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p48hIM-2in","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8830,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8827\/revisions\/8830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tonmeister.ca\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}