In MMD of April 16th, Rob DeLand asks if anyone knows of a Gulbransen
Recordo player.  I have one here in Tasmania and it plays very well
indeed.  I think it's a White House model - it's got lots of fancy
carving on it at any rate - and it has a Motor Player Recordo B
expression system, which is a very responsive one.  It needs to be,
because my player has an upside-down tracker bar, so that the leading
edges of the five Recordo slots at each end of the bar are trailing edges
in fact.  Even so, out of about 450 Recordo rolls I think I have only
one, a pretty fiery Liszt piece, where one can notice that some of the
accents are being missed.

The tracker bar mistake, by the way, is an original factory error.
I didn't put it back in upside down when I rebuilt the player mechanism!
As I had never closely looked at another Recordo I didn't even know that
it was wrong until some years later, when a visiting player guru from the
mainland (of Aus.) pointed it out.  My embarrassment was intense for
about a year until I started to pull the spool box apart to  turn the bar
over.  I found that to turn it over would require significant drilling
and tapping of new holes and concluded that it had always been that way.

I have seen two other Gulbransen Recordos in Tasmania but I don't know
where they are now.  A friend of mine in Denver has one, and I think
a recent recruit to MMD on the Australia mainland has one.  So they
are about.

John Phillips  (Hobart, Tasmania)