[Fran] has been curious concerning the innards of Tivoli Audio’s Mannequin One radio, however was reluctant to shell out $200 simply to tear it aside. However she discovered one not too long ago on eBay, received the public sale, and proceeded to do a assessment and teardown. Spoiler alert, she was disillusioned.
Bodily talking, the radio seems nice and has fairly an array of I/O connections. The geared tuning knob seems cool, however is closely damped which [Fran] isn’t eager about. Turning it on, a couple of extra quirks are found. The amount management is out-of-whack — it seems they substituted a linear taper potentiometer the place a logarithmic taper was known as for.
One other downside, at the least within the RF-dense metropolitan areas like Philadelphia, is the FM tuner’s station-lock characteristic. It’s so sturdy that it may be unattainable to tune in weak stations. That is particularly ironic since, in response to Wikipedia, that was one in every of audio engineer Henry Kloss’s principal targets when founding Tivoli Audio again in 2000:
Their first product was the Mannequin One, a easy to make use of mid-century trendy designed desk high radio with a high-performance tuner, receiving FM radio in congested city areas, whereas sustaining the flexibility to pick distant or low energy stations. Kloss had famous that the mid 60’s wave of Japanese radios lacked the flexibility to obtain FM stations in congested areas, and this turned a defining purpose of his radio designs all through his profession.
Apparently, many of us within the YouTube feedback say their Mannequin One radios have none of those points. We marvel if [Fran] has obtained a broken radio, or perhaps a more moderen model produced with much less consideration to element. In case you have a damaged Mannequin One radio, earlier than tossing it, think about the hack we wrote about final 12 months, turning it into an web radio.
