When our Shanghai office was still held together by optimism and cheap rent, I picked up this pair of old Red Lantern radios from an antique market for RMB 200 – each!
They probably date from somewhere between the late 1960s and late 1970s and would originally have sat proudly in someone’s living room. The radios themselves were beyond saving, but inside each cabinet was a huge paper driver and a surprising amount of empty space. I wired around the valve amp, wired the drivers directly to an Marantz and quickly discovered they hated bass. The solution came from a box of old computer speakers. A forgotten subwoofer now handles everything below about 100Hz while the Red Lanterns do the rest. The setup makes absolutely no sense on paper, but somehow it works. Voices sound natural, acoustic instruments have a nice presence, and the whole thing fills a room with very little effort. Not bad for two abandoned radios and a subwoofer that was never supposed to leave a desk.
