Bought this Philips REVERBEO beast on the way back from the lake district about 25 years ago, ebay special. Did enough to get her going before coming to Spain and she has sat here since then doing nothing. Will get around to finishing it one day. Main thing is replacing the original fluorescent dial light which probably lasted a few years from new. I was thinking of using a bit of ex TV defuser screen and some LEDs. The original light gave a lovely blue-green glow, matching the Philips logo and magic eye. I thought I would look around to see what there was in the way of luminescent bits and pieces. Stumbled across something on Ebay. 8” x 5” thin sheets, various colours, luminescent, with a little power supply. The advert said that these could be cut to size within reason. So I thought I would take a chance and go for the green colour, which would hopefully match the Philips logo and magic eye.
The sheets eventually arrived and set about dismantling the radio. Slide the chassis forward and carefully remove the front glass. The original fluorescent backlight is a plastic module and powered from the HT. Removing this would need much effort as it is all behind the tuning cords. Cutting the new sheet to the same size as the original assembly and tested it. To my amazement it still worked, so sealed the cut edge with tape. Now the new sheet could be sled into place on the original backlight assembly and held into position using double sided tape.
The little power supply that came with the sheet runs from 12V DC. Testing it on the bench supply proved it was quite bright, in fact too bright. From the 6.3VAC valve heater supply, I fitted a bridge rectifier, 1000uF filter capacitor, giving about 8 Volts. This produced just the right brightness. I found that, after assembling the radio, between stations on FM, VHF, there was a, interference. This was coming from the little inverter power supply and happened to be around 10 kHz, just right to upset the local IF oscillator. So, placed it in a bit of screening and hid near one of the loudspeakers.
Set has a spring-line reverb tank, which makes classical music sounding like it’s in a concert hall. Sound quality is amazing
Good outcome. Pleased.
