Seetha Phone Company is a tiny antique shop. Established in 1924, it still sells gramophones and LPs.

Blaring horns of vehicles, shouting vendors and strolling people is daily afternoon scene at the famous wholesale market on Avenue Road in Chickpet. But amidst the cacophony comes from the second floor of a dilapidated structure, a soothing ‘rangageetham’ by legendary theatre artiste-cum-vocalist Mysore Korrur Appa.

A flight of poorly illuminated and narrow stairs leads to a shop where an elderly man playing music from an iconic record player – the gramophone. The first medium that brought music labels to people across the globe, the gramophone was phased out of the music scene with the advent of technology over the years. Now there are only a handful who still seek the music player primarily as an ornament.

But for D.S. Sreenivasa Murthy from the second floor shop, the gramophone is family. “The gramophone is part of my life and I can’t imagine a day having not to deal with the wonder musical player,” ecstatically adds the 75-year-old owner of Seethaphone Company that makes gramophones even to this day.

Set up in 1924 by Murthy’s father Seetharama Setty in the same structure on Avenue Road, the shop began selling Odeon and Columbia gramophone players completing with the HMV brand then. “Around the 1930s many gramophone shops started coming up in Bangalore and my father decided to setup his own brand. Thereafter he imported double spring motors and hand winding equipment from the UK and Switzerland and purchased rest of the parts from Bombay to assemble a gramophone and thus originated the Seethaphone brand of gramophones,” recalls the senior citizen whose company’s first gramophone was then priced Rs. 37.

Setty did flourishing business until his demise in 1963 and Murthy took over the family business. Murthy claims Nobel laureate Sir. C.V. Raman once visited the shop in the early 60s looking for a gramophone’s wooden trumpet horn and penned remarks in the visitors’ book which he still cherishes.

The introduction of new technology gradually phased out the gramophone by the beginning of the 70s. “I shifted our business to selling other sound equipment like speakers but I still went on producing the gramophones even through it wasn’t profitable,” says Murthy who didn’t want to abandon what his father started.

Finally in 1995, Murthy was forced to wind up full-fledged gramophone production and began dealing in brass idols from the ground floor of the building. But to this day he replicates the iconic trumpet horn and portable gramophone models and sources music records for enthusiast and vintage goods aficionados. “After all it is my family business and I will run it till my last no matter profit or loss,” adds Bengaluru’s gramophone man whose company just turned 91.