RCA Vitaphone Talking Pictures Turntable & Disc

A circa late 1920’s RCA pedestal turntable for “talking pictures”. Made of heavy cast iron, this turntable stood behind the 35mm movie projector in the projection booth and was linked by a rotating shaft that provided power to the turntable and kept it synchronized with the film. In VG original condition, it comes with a 16” Vitaphone disc # 553-5 in VG condition with original Vitaphone paper sleeve. Sound-on-disc systems were a foundational class of technologies used to play back synchronized audio during the birth of the "talking picture" era in the mid-to-late 1920s. These systems relied on a separate phonograph record that was mechanically linked to the movie projector to match the audio with the visuals. While several inventors experimented with linking phonographs to projectors, the Western Electric Vitaphone System became the first commercially triumphant sound-on-disc process. Marketed by Warner Bros. starting in 1925, the system perfected synchronization by running the turntable and the film projector off the exact same motor drive shaft. The soundtracks were pressed onto massive 16-inch shellac discs. To accommodate the length of a regular film reel, they ran at a slower speed of 33 1/3 RPM rather than the standard 78 RPM of consumer records at the time. The technology was publicly debuted in 1926 with the film Don Juan, which featured a synchronized musical score but no spoken words. Its ultimate validation came with the landmark October 6, 1927 release of The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length "talkie" to integrate synchronized singing and dialogue sequences, which revolutionized the film industry. Despite offering superior sound quality over early competing sound-on-film experiments, sound-on-disc systems introduced overwhelming operational challenges. Because the audio was locked into a physically continuous groove on a separate disc, film editing became immensely complex. If a frame of film was damaged or cut, the projectionist had to manually account for the missing time, or the film and record would fall permanently out of sync. The heavy playback needles of the era rapidly wore down the shellac grooves. Each disc could only be played about 20 times before it became too degraded or skipped, requiring theaters to carefully track usage with checkboxes on the record labels. By 1931, the movie industry completely shifted away from sound-on-disc in favor of sound-on-film technology such as Fox's Movietone or RCA's Photophone. Sound-on-film printed the audio track as a photographic pattern directly alongside the visual frames on the filmstrip itself. This guaranteed automatic synchronization and eliminated the risk of a projectionist dropping a disc or starting the needle on the wrong groove. Warner Bros. officially retired the direct-to-disc Vitaphone process in the early 1930s. It is very heavy and measures 32” tall, 20” long, 20” wide. No shipping on this item, customer pickup or 3rd party transporter only.