Our Dream Jukebox

I was searching for a jukebox years ago, but we never had the space and they were too expensive or too ugly. I kept seeing facebook listing for this jukebox, which I loved; but they wanted $7,000 for it.

After seeing it occasionally for weeks, I decided to lowball him just in case; and then forget about it. To my surprise, he said, “why not…it’s been eight weeks and no one else has a better offer.”

It turns out that the seller’s father used to be a regular at a diner in Jayton, TX, and would always play the jukebox. When the diner closed down, he bought it and took it home, then set it up in his basement in Greeley. It’s been sitting in that basement ever since.

I collected a crew to get it out of the basement one day after the largest ever recorded snowfall in Greeley, and true to the seller’s word; the jukebox worked perfectly. And he included a LOT of extra records.

We got it home and it still played great!

The jukebox was built in 1959 and was the first stereo jukebox ever built in the USA

As we started playing it, I realized the volume control was a pain because every record is a different volume and the volume control was purposely inconvenient so that patrons wouldn’t play with it. It also blew a fuse a couple of times when a record skipped; so we decided to replace the amplifier with a new solid state one.

The new amplifier bolted right in and gave us the following features:

Improved sound (see video below)
An accessible remote control for power, volume, and song rejection
Bluetooth control
We can use it as a bluetooth speaker or as a sonos speaker. We elected to make it a sonos speaker.

The new amp was easy to install and worked great.