Magic Eye Tube | Hacker News Reader

Magic Eye Tube

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54 pointsHooke19 comments

These look way cooler in person than videos and photos show them for online. I’ve played some guitar amps that had them for indicators (Selmer Zodiac) and they were so damn cool looking and futuristic feeling. I keep hoping they will make a comeback on some amps.

They should definitely bring these back for tube amps!

Many high end ones have them. I have a few 50s and 60s hifi sets with magic eyes, but most are for tuning. Newer designs use them as a gain or VU meter.

My father owned a Phillips AM/FM/SW/LW radio from the 60's that had one for tuning. It was the most magical part of the whole item.

They were once a futuristic symbol. See "The Day the Earth Stood Still", (1951), at 53:50, where ET phones home.[1]

[1] https://archive.org/details/The.Day.The.Earth.Stood.Still195...

My hope was this was somehow related to the "Magic Eye" book series and finally those who'd spent years "Magic Eye"-challenged could experience the joy of hidden 3D objects!

Lol, me too. Your comment prompted me to Google for it and found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=2AKtp3XHn38&...

Wow, I forgot about these. And the smell of warm tube electronics in a wooden housing.

>Magic eye tubes were used as the recording level indicator for tape recorders

Pretty sure that's where I saw them, in old reel-to-reel tape decks.

Old radios too [1]. A few years back there was an intense discussion on some antiquarian site about what the function was for a central hole in an otherwise beautiful antique wooden philco radio cabinet. Finally some bright old duffer shows up and allows: "Oh, that's where the 'magic eye' went". Of course, the rest thought he was just pulling their legs about there being a "magic eye" on these things.

[1] https://mikesradiosandstuff.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/10875...

In the early 90's I scavenged a broken reel-to-reel tape recorder from a neighbor's trash. It had a magic eye tube that still functioned. I ended up disabling the tape portion and hooking it up to a cassette deck to play music thru it and watch the magic eye tube. At one point I stuck it in a dark room w/ my parents' camcorder pointed at it in macro mode and recorded some of its pulsing and winking to use in videos that I cut together.

The Korg NuTube would be an interesting basis for a new display device. https://korgnutube.com/en/

While it doesn't have the cool visuals (Feature request for 2.0?) it can actually do tube-y things in your circuit. I imagine a VFD magic eye simulator would be possible and you could actually use it as an active component.

Already done, see here:

http://techlib.com/electronics/roberts_radio.htm

Surprisingly these can still be bought easily on Ebay, Aliexpress etc. Many seem to be Soviet "new old stock" models (or perhaps actual new items?). This might be explained by the fact that they've been used quite a lot in Soviet military equipment, even long after they were considered obsolete in the west.

These have always been magical devices to me. I still use and maintain an old Heathkit capacitor tester that uses one as its indicator.

I have a few of this on my vintage vacuum-tube shortwave radios. They're used to indicate how strong the signal is for tuning.

These things were standard on vintage Blaupunkt Radiograms, indicating the strength of the signal.

One of my favorite tubes, happy to have a working one in my Grundig 4010. Original EM34s can be quite expensive, unfortunately. Luckily the 6E5C is much more common and can usually, with some effort, replace an EM34.

Oh, I believe I've seen similar devices on the little boxes next to railways in Canada. Is this the case?

From what I have seen, those are some sort of neon glow lamps. Probably used instead of incandescent lamps for much longer life.

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