By popular request of one (thanks Niels!) here’s my little rig of GE components.
Being quite fond of early 50s 10 inch lp’s, I’ve been looking for ways properly reproduce those pre RIAA records.
After finding the Pickering another option with more selections was this GE Record Filter. Like most gear of this era she’s quite a looker. Nice shiny metal face plate and chassis set into a deep brown Bakelite cabinet.
Luckily I already had a UPX-003B I sourced to pair with my GE RPX / VRii so the filter fit in perfectly.
That pre and cartridges have been discussed at length here already so I’ll focus on the filter which I can’t seem to find too much info on.
It has the following selectors
A low cutoff selector (in Cycles)
- 0
- 40
- 60
- 80
A compensator (in decibels)
- Flat - 0
- Euro 78 - 6
- Long LP - 10
- AES - 12
- RIAA - 14
- Col(umbia?) - 16
A high cutoff selector (in Kilocycles)
- Flat
- 9
- 5
- 3
Now someone more knowledgeable will have to educate me on the technical stuff going on inside but dialing them to the correct settings as outlined in the following chart (from a 1955 issue of high fidelity) makes the magic happen
Some impressions on the sound…
It seems to breathe a bit of life into to those old records. I’ve been particularly impressed with early Capitol sessions which quite nice when dialed to the correct settings. I’m also decently impressed with the high freq selector’s ability to cut noise from records with lots of groove wear however it’s hit or miss as it works well on certain thrashed lp’s but not at all with others.
One complaint is that I’m still not getting much bass with this setup when compared to my Bogens onboard preamp. I think that’s more to do with the UPX than the filter though so any suggestions there are welcome.
Overall I don’t really think it’s a piece of kit that most folks will need as I believe many of these older disks were re-recorded? (according to that snip from High Fidelity above) for RIAA and even with the filter the sound isn’t significantly different from my Bogen’s phono stage (and I assume many other 1950s pre and integrated amps with similar curve selections) but seeing as this is the mono rabbit hole of the forum I felt like some of you might be interested.
If any of you veterans know more about these units or any other equalization options I’d love to hear about it! Also if anyone has the schematics for this thing id love to take a look.
Now to find a GE tonearm, GE amplifier and a GE CoAxial to complete the setup!
