Here's where you could buy the new "NO-HORN" machines to play the latest records. Wow, wind the machine up and it will play for all of 15 minutes before you have to crank it up again ! And such sound quality ! You didn't need to push your ear into the horn to hear. I knew a man who as a small boy had the job of winding the machine and changing records for his invalid father who loved opera but was bed ridden. The man (boy) said he used to jump up and down all day and "learned" opera in short doses. No chance of a Ring cycle then. The shop in the postcard was owned by one of my ancestors and apparently was the hip place to hang out in 1910. Click on photo to enlarge. Look at the farmer's hats, proper Cantonese land farmer hats, noit the famous Hakka hats photographers like. One of the regular customers at this shop pre 1914 was the captain of the German battleship the Emden. Look up Karl von Muller on google - REALLY AMAZING story.
Thanks to Ian Calderbank at www.gramophone.info, source of lots of info on old gramophones, this picture can be dated to around 1910, as hornless gramophones were introduced 1908. This particular brand sounds American. The shop was into the "latest" from America, and imported new hybrid seeds straight from Luther Burbank esq.
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