Acousticon Radio Unit The Acousticon Radio Unit was manufactured by the General Acoustic Company, which later became Dictograph Products, Inc. of New York, NY some time between 1927 and 1932. This assistive listening device let a hard of hearing person listen to a radio via headphones, a receiver or a bone conduction transducer while the rest of the family listened to the radio via its loudspeaker. |  | Click picture for larger view | | |   | | |
The Acousticon Radio Unit was "adaptable to all types of radio sets" because of its ingenious design. You didn't have to modify the radio itself. All you needed to do was unplug the pre-amplifier tube, plug in the adapter socket (shown right) and plug the tube back into the top of the adapter socket.
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| Top view of the Acousticon Radio Unit adapter socket. You plugged the tube you removed in the step above back into this socket. The adapter socket had a 11˝" cord with an attached plug on it that hung down outside of the radio. This plug/socket worked with a pentode—a 5-pronged tube with two grids. |  | Click picture for larger view | | | |
Acousticon made more than one model of the Acousticon Radio Unit. This is another Acousticon Radio Unit adapter socket from the same era as the above one. However, this plug/socket worked with a triode—a 4-pronged tube with one grid.
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| The receptacle (socket) from the adapter socket (left) hung outside of the radio ready for use. To use the Acousticon Radio Unit, the person simply plugged it into this receptacle. |  | Click picture for larger view | | | |
| The tube at the right housed the impedance-matching transformer and a capacitor. The screw-eye (left end) let you hang this tube near the radio. (The cord from the plug to this tube was 12" long.) This tube measured 1⅝" in diameter by 4⅞" long. It was relatively heavy weighing just over half a pound. |  | Click picture for larger view | | | |
| A cord 19' 3" long connected the volume control (right) to the above tube. The volume control of the Acousticon Radio Unit shared the same fancy "Silver Anniversary" design on its volume control as did the Acousticon Model 28 carbon hearing aid.
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| Side view of the Acousticon Radio Unit showing the on-off/volume control slider. (Loud was to the left and soft and off to the right.) |  | Click picture for larger view | | | |
| View of the Acousticon Radio Unit volume control (bottom left), 24"cord and bone conductor transducer (top center). Missing is the headband to hold the bone conductor transducer tight to the listener's head. The transducer rested on the bone behind the ear. Instead of the bone conductor transducer, you could also use either the same headphone or receiver and ear mold as was used on the Acousticon Model 28 hearing aid. |  | Click picture for larger view | | | |
| The cord connecting the Acousticon Radio Unit volume control to the bone conduction transducer had two sizes of pins. The large pins plugged into the volume control (left), and the small pins into the bone conduction transducer (right). The pins at each end were also of unequal diameters so you couldn't plug them in backwards, thus preserving proper polarity. Some of the Acousticon receivers were hard wired, but some of them had sockets that also fit this pin configuration. |  | Click picture for larger view | | | |
| Outside view of the original box for the Acousticon Radio Unit.
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