About Retraphonics
Keeping Original Vintage Audio Alive.
Retraphonics is a Gold Coast based vintage audio specialist. We restore original radiograms and vintage audio equipment, with a particular love for the Australian-made pieces of the valve and early transistor era.
There was a period when a record player was not a gadget but a piece of furniture. Australian manufacturers built radiograms to sit in the front room for thirty years: hardwood and veneer cabinets, a valve amplifier wired point to point, a heavy English or Japanese changer, and speakers chosen for the volume of the cabinet they lived in. Nothing about them was disposable.
That engineering is what drew us in. What began as a genuine fascination with vintage audio turned into a specialist restoration business, established in 2023, with radiograms rebuilt in our Gold Coast workshop and finished pieces travelling to customers across Australia.
Our approach
Preserve the piece, don't reinvent it.
A radiogram was designed as one complete system. The amplifier, turntable, speakers and cabinet were engineered around each other, so the easy route — hollowing out the cabinet and dropping in a modern record player — throws away the very thing that makes the piece worth owning.
We restore the original equipment wherever practical. Components that have aged, failed or drifted out of specification are replaced appropriately; parts that are still doing their job are cleaned, serviced and kept. Turntables are dismantled, degreased, lubricated, adjusted and tested. Cabinetry is cleaned and nourished rather than stripped back to something it never was. The character of the piece stays intact.
Every piece is assessed on its own condition, and nothing leaves the workshop until it has been tested and played properly.
What we work with
Australian names, first.
Kriesler, HMV, AWA, PYE, Philips and General Electric come through the workshop regularly — units built for Australian homes, often by people who expected them to be repaired rather than replaced. Alongside the radiograms we restore and work on other vintage audio from the same period: speakers, amplifiers, turntables and complete sound systems.
Some of what we restore is our own, sourced and brought back for sale. Much of it belongs to someone else — a piece that has been in the family for decades and deserves to be playing again.