I have no clue,anyone?

My, what a wonderfully strange creation! I think the seller is correct that it was intended as a reverberation device. It may have served as the tone cabinet for an electronic organ in a church; it's styling looks the part anyway. The audio signal (whatever it was) was fed to the 600B, which spoke and excited the strings tuned to many different pitches and created a haunting sustained sound. The walls of what at first glance appeared to be a bass horn are thin, and with the S holes allow communication with the air volumes trapped behind, adding to the reverberant effect. It looks to me like someone added the red cloth later on to reduce the output, so it may have worked even better than intended.

If one depresses the sustain pedal on a normal piano and shouts into the instrument it is easy to hear the sort of effect that the designer of this device was after. The tuning pins and wire appear to be standard piano items, possibly obtained from the church's piano tuner. If it wasn't in PA I'd be tempted to pick it up and experiment with it.

I did a little patent searching, and while i couldn't find anything directly pertaining to the object in the OP, i did find a couple that seemed to be exploring the same or similar idea.

This is interesting stuff, and the principles behind it have been visited many times in the last century. There's lots more out there in the patent files if somebody has the interest and time to kill. While not closely related, there are some interesting stringed and amplified contraptions from folks with names like Marshall, Martin, and Ross to name a few.

Patent US3696698 - INSTRUMENT FOR PURIFYING SOUNDS THROUGH SYMPATHETIC VIBRATION - Google Patents

Patent US1924063 - SPEAKER - Google Patents

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The tuning pins and wire appear to be standard piano items, possibly obtained from the church's piano tuner.

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I've never known a piano tuner to carry that many tuning pins of the same diameter and length, or wire for that matter as the gauge seems well graduated across the scale. Usually the tuner carries a few scraps of a few whole sizes of wire, and if he breaks one or is asked to replace a broken string, you'll get whatever he's carrying that's closest to the broken one.

But, what really blows it out of the DIY camp are the cast iron harps/frames and the proper layout and machining for the installation of the steel hitch pins. That process was almost certainly done in the machine shop/metalworking part of a piano factory. Further, the hitch pins themselves would be difficult to source from anyplace other than a piano factory. They are not typically available from piano parts suppliers.

maybe it ran the other way, you plucked the strings and the speaker was like a large microphone? Nah that doesn't make any sense.

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Originally Posted by cradeldorf

maybe it ran the other way, you plucked the strings and the speaker was like a large microphone? Nah that doesn't make any sense.

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Generally, if the strings were supposed to generate the fundamental, they would be damped with some kind of mechanism that would allow only the chosen string/s to speak while muting the others.

These strings appear to want to ring sympathetically to fundamentals being produced by the speaker.

That is the coolest speaker/effects unit I've ever seen. With an Altec speaker nonetheless! I wonder who manufactured it? I'd love to hear how that thing sounds/operates. It's an hour south of Binghamton, NY. Bowtie--that's in your backyard, isn't it?

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It's an hour south of Binghamton, NY. Bowtie--that's in your backyard, isn't it?

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Yepper, a little less that 2 hrs to the southwest, in the heart of Anthracite country.

It would work great hooked up to a microphone to let the congregation hear the voice of God or the Great Wizard :)

A variation of an air harp? http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j...OdzK7g&cad=rja

What do you think? I wasn't aware there is such an instrument as a wind harp. Here's a pic. http://www.harmonicwindharps.com/ima...ind%20Harp.jpg

It is a Texas Jaw Harp.