Actually, that title makes it sound like the project was all carefully planned out, but it’s more a case of some converging ambitions. The first (and one that most recorded music enthusiasts must share) was to pipe music around the house. When you live in an older building, the walls between rooms are pretty thick, and the only way to have the same tune percolating throughout has so far been to turn it up unbearably loud in the one where the source is in the hope that it’ll reach where you want to be. In days of ‘hi fi’ gone, the answer would be to run speaker cables between rooms but, again, in an older house that means either drilling through inches of brick or ripping up floor boards. These days the answer is one of the wireless systems like Sonos, and that’s what I’ve been vaguely hankering after, but the downside (apart from the cost) is trying to hide modern speakers in a period room and it’s also not straightforward trying to plug in multiple feeds from such passé equipment as a record deck and amplifier.

Coming from the other end of the technology spectrum was a desire to unearth the vintage radios that have been stored away in the loft for well over twenty years. One’s a bit on the large side, but there are two lovely tabletop sets, both fully restored and rewired, that I acquired at the old Gloucester Antiques Centre back in 1990, that I’ve been longing to put on display. The problem is, though, what on earth do you listen to on a radio that only receives Medium and Long Wave? The chances of finding something suitable on wavelengths that are rapidly falling out of use means there would rarely be anything worth turning it on for. I had thought about ripping out the innards and replacing them with a wireless speaker (I’ve done it before to put a docking station in a completely knackered portable unit), but that seemed a criminal thing to do to a perfectly serviceable piece of vintage equipment. Hence why they’ve been boxed up the loft for so long.

In truth, I’ve been sitting on the answer for almost as long – an AM Radio Transmitter kit I was given as a thank you for the donation of the valve radio from my Dad’s old radiogram to the vintage radio restorers community. The accompanying leaflet starts off in ambitious mood: “Ever dreamed of being a disc jockey or radio talk show host? Set up your own AM radio station with you in charge. Broadcast crystal clear programming from your own studios to nearby neighbours”, but the key is in the sub text: “You can use a standard line level audio input…”. In other words, this should be the way to take the music from one source and broadcast it to a spare AM frequency so you can hear it on your old radio.

I’ve been trying to work up the courage to give it a try but, with my ‘proper’ stereo in my attic room, and some fairly offputting technical instructions, it’s always been one of those things I’d get around to, but never have (it didn’t help that, although already assembled, the kit came with the full technical assembly instructions which were pretty daunting to someone who has to check the diagram every time he wires a plug). The catalyst, however, was reworking our dining room to install turntable, CD player, tuner and amp where we could get to them easily, making the ability to get the music from one room to another something worth pursuing. An afternoon’s experimenting on the living room floor followed, taking the sound output from a spare cassette deck, broadcasting it from the transmitter, and ‘catching’ it through the tuner on the other side of the room. After years of FM and digital radio, I’d forgotten how fickle AM signals were, and it took much fiddling about to find and fine tune a frequency strong enough that wasn’t competing with something else on the waveband. Having managed to get Andy Williams from one side of the room to the other (it was the first cassette to come to hand!), it was time to retrieve the old sets from the attic and see if the concept would work…

…and it did. Another change of frequency for best results, and the time came to hook the transmitter up to the full sound set up. First came a CD, which worked fine, and then an iPod plugged into a spare input on the amp – success again. Leaving the music source playing, we took one set into the front room and another up to the bedroom, plugged in, waited for the warm-up – and listened as some choice rockabilly blared out of original 1950s speakers – Wonderful. It’s not a set up that would work for all genres as the sound quality isn’t perfect, but as period music played through period technology, it sounds just right.

For a while, we thought the project would have to go on hold when one of the sets appeared to have got over-excited about being brought back to life after its two decades of slumber and blew a valve; fortunately, we’ve found an expert vintage radio restorer in the local area who not only quickly traced the problem to a loose connection and inspired me with some ambitious projects that I shall be writing about soon. In the meantime, that was enough to send me up into the loft to fish out the remaining sets, and starting into a cunning plan to get round the scarcity and cost of old-fashioned 9-volt batteries – watch this space…