Rock-Ola

Rock-Ola Bubbler Harley-Davidson Digital Music Center Jukebox

Some people collect stamps. Other people like old coins. My wife and I have always been fans of music and have transitioned over the years from albums, cassettes and 8-tracks to hundreds of CDs and now MP3 and streaming services.

Several years ago, we commissioned Rock-ola in California to build the Bubbler Harley-Davidson Digital Music Center jukebox pictured above. Each jukebox is built by hand and if you were to order one today, would take 3-6 months before delivery.

Photo from www.rock-ola.com

Our jukebox specs:

• Five speaker, dual 3-way system (2x 3” Tweeter Speakers, 2x 6.5” Full Range Speakers, 1x 10" Dual Voice Coil Powered Subwoofer).

• A 19" touch screen.

• A one Terabyte hard drive which currently stores over 50,000 songs depending on compression preferences (It's rated for 13,000 CDs, but many of ours were loaded as MP3s, so we were able to get significantly more music added.).

• A QSC 425-watt RMS Amplifier.

• We added two pair of Bose external speakers for a more surround sound in our rec room.

Currently, our system has 55,660 tracks, 11,775 albums, 12,107 artists covering 137 genres with artists starting at "A vs. Monkey King" and ending with "ZZoilo"

The nice part about the jukebox is that because it stores the music on a physical hard drive, there are multiple ways to add music to the system. Ours has a CD reader that you can use to load music (we were able to convert all our CDs into the box) as well as a USB reader, so we subscribe to streaming services like Apple and Spotify and add MP3s as desired. Rock-ola has a software system built into its jukebox called QSC that connects to the internet and finds the artwork for an album cover if available and adds it to the screen.

Some of the things I like about the system are:

• You can set up playlists for parties - Because of the touchscreen, you can set up a new playlist and give it a name. Once the playlist is established, you can go to a particular album and drag either the entire album to your playlist or individual songs off an album to the playlist.

• You can sort playlists and search for albums and songs alphabetically or even by genre.

• If you've set up a playlist and someone has a special request that's not in your playlist, you can grab the song from the left side and drag it directly into the next song to be played after the current one is done.

• The system will do self-maintenance while idle, checking for updates, correcting hard drive errors, compressing and organizing new files.

• When you first turn the system on, the neon lighting is amazing to see. It even has liquid tubes that bubble up once the system is warmed up.

• It has a remote control and place to plug in a keyboard if needed.

• It has internet connectivity and a built-in gateway for diagnostics and upgrades.

I'm sure if you've read up to this point, you can guess that this jukebox wasn't inexpensive. When we bought ours, it was ordered, built and shipped by truck to us from California and cost about $7,800. Current pricing for the same jukebox is now about $11,000 plus $800.00 to ship it. They weigh approximately 245 pounds and the dimensions are Dimensions: (H) 61 1/2 in x (W) 33 in x (D) 19 1/2 in. Because of the size, the feet are on hidden casters and can be moved around easily.

I've heard that there are places that sell used units in the area. Ours came from a place in Reading, PA that sells jukeboxes, vending machines and pinball equipment for home use.

If you're curious and would like to know more, check out Authentic Handmade American Jukeboxes. Direct from the Manufacturer | Rock-Ola .