Zenith Tube Record Player Console Find.
 

My latest find. According to the guy who had it for sale, "It sounds bad, like something is wrong with it."

The price was almost free, so I drove the 25 miles and picked it up.

Cabinet is in pretty good shape. A touch of static when turning the bass control. I put on a record and yes, it did sound pretty bad.


I figured out what was "wrong with it". I flipped the needle over. BAM! It was magic. Sounds great now. It's amazing that he never did that. There's not a thing wrong with it. One of the wires to one of the speakers was dangling, so I plugged it back in. BAM! It sounds even better than at first.


I don't know what this model is called. Maybe a "Cantata"?

https://i.imgur.com/1vVNQyh.jpg?1

https://i.imgur.com/GjVVBXD.jpg?1

https://i.imgur.com/m4Hbsgh.jpg?1

https://i.imgur.com/ay9SXOM.jpg?1

https://i.imgur.com/gVgybp0.jpg?1
https://i.imgur.com/MoLmPk6.jpg?1
https://i.imgur.com/wVWxLkB.jpg?1

Thats a sweet HiFi.
We had one a few years newer. It was mono but it had a stereo EV
cartridge. You could add a matching amp / speaker to make it
stereo. I doubt many bothered. My old man bought a Sherwood FM
tuner for it instead.
The compensation switch is a rare touch & useful. Only seen it on
Zeniths of this era & a few super high end HiFi's.
Since I was about 6 yrs old my greatest memory was the cobra
tone arm with that beady eye. I could stare at it for hours. By the
time of the Beatles I played every album on it & added a dump
picked amp for stereo. It was the cats ass.........

TNX 4 the memories
73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

Wonderful!!!
 

What a Beauty!!!

Yeah, it's pretty nice. Of course some of it is not real wood, it's mostly that photo finish laminate that was popular back then. But it does look good in the room.

I got it back today. It sounds great. Nice full sound now, with way more bass.

AND.....the record changer works like new.

I like this thing a lot. Nice tube sound. AND.....the tweeters do work!

This is beautiful, well built, they sounded very nice. And stlll good listening today. A joy to own, to operate, to enjoy. And I like them. "Zenith, the Quality Stays in even when the Name Falls Off". Chicago craftsmanship at it's best, hand wired.

i've got this same unit in my basement that someone dropped off for me to work on a few years back and it takes one of those"powerpoint" needles but I'm not sure which one it takes as VM Enthusiasts lists at least 6 of those types of needles that Zenith used for their Cobra-Matic record changers and the ones I thought it would of been the ones that looked like it would match the original turned out to be either too big or were stereo rather than mono, and the original needle had no part numbers on it and the cartridge on the unit has no maker marks or model numbers on it anywhere.

Unfortunately the guy that brought it over to me to repair it, I havent heard from him in a long time and when I've tried to call him about his record player I would just get his voicemail.

Zenith has always been my favorite brand of TV, radio and audio gear. I've had several Zenith radios (I still have a few), Zenith televisions, and Zenith stereo phonographs, all of which worked and sounded great and gave me many years of excellent service; unfortunately, I had to give up most of my collection, including all but one of the televisions, and start absolutely fresh when, 21 years ago, I moved to a very small apartment from a 3-bedroom house with a basement.

BTW, Zenith was one of the best makes of TV, radio and audio, IMHO. It was a darn shame the company decided to leave Chicago for Korea. However, in the early '80s until I moved, I had a Zenith four-mode stereo system (their model IS-4041) which had been made in Korea. It worked great the 17 years I had it, but again, when I moved to an apartment, I had to give it up since it was too darn big for my new place (the main unit was almost as wide as my desk, and the speakers were in large walnut-grain wooden boxes). I replaced it with an Aiwa CX-NA888 4-mode digital stereo system, which is actually much better than the Zenith (50 watts per channel, while the Zenith was only 5 WPC). The Aiwa bookshelf system also has a CD player which can play up to 3 disks sequentially (the modern-day equivalent of a record changer). The system sounds great to me as well, even though each enclosure only has a 3" tweeter and a 6.5" woofer. (There may also be a midrange speaker in each of those enclosures as well.)

The only thing I don't like about this system is the selectivity of the stereo FM tuner. Since this system's FM tuner has fixed AFC, it will pull the tuning toward the strongest station(s) on the dial, which irks me because there is a strong FM station about eight miles from here on 104.7 MHz. That station completely drowns out a classical music station 0.2 MHz up the dial, at 104.9 MHz; I am sure I could hear that station very well were it not for the tuner's AFC locking the tuner on the stronger station. I am not a dyed-in-the-wool classical music fan (I grew up listening to rock music), but I would like to hear the classical station on 104.9 once in a while.

I hated like anything to hear of the end of the Zenith Radio Corporation, and have no idea what led to its downfall, but I do feel it was a tremendous loss to the hi-fi and television industry since, as I said, Zenith was one of the best if not the best brands of hi-fi stereo, TV, and transistor radios.

I am all but amazed no other company offered to take over Zenith to keep it going in the 21st century and beyond. To see a company like this, which had been founded in 1918 and had many, many followers, just throw in the towel after all those years and move from Chicago to Korea is just too darn bad, IMHO.

Watch it and weep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c

This is saddening and incredibly frustrating, looking back and watching the people at Zenith and Motorola, who knew what was coming and couldn't do anything but wait to be devoured.

TL;DW: Nixon administration traded our consumer electronics industry for a military base in Japan.

That connector in which the external cable is pluged, what is for?

That photofinish stuff looks nice, but it won't take much abuse. Also, if the cement which holds it to the wood it is attached to dries out or otherwise fails, the material will detach itself and, again, become all too easy to literally tear off. This very thing has happened to the photofinish on my desk; in fact, some of it has been irreparably scratched when my cat runs across the desk itself. The desk looks bad now, but there is nothing I can do about it, although I have been able to replace some of the damaged finish with wood-grain shelf paper.

I don't know when your Zenith stereo was made, but if it was made in the '70s or '80s (I would guess the former, in the latter part of the decade, but it could have been made in the '80s, as I am about to explain), the "finish" was all but certainly that photofinish stuff, which as you said was becoming extremely popular by that time, and is still being used to this day.

I clicked on the link to the video you mentioned, and received a message that it is no longer available.

Cobramatic changer would date to late 50’s, maybe real early 60’s. I started with a Zenith dealer in 1963. 2 gram tone arm. A few years later would have been solid state. No photo finish to speak of in 63. That looks like Cherry veneer or Mahogany. I still have a 1968 Zenith cabinet built in Springfield, MO. My avatar. All cherry hardwoods and veneers. The speaker cloth is the original with no damage. Now just a cabinet used to hold home theater gear. I wish I could find a set of original doors.

The Cobra was not 2 gram. Micro-Touch which followed Cobra in 1962, was 2 gram. Micro-Touch was also much lower output, much better for record life.

Model number “HF20R” is covered in Sams Photofact 346-21, which was published in mid 1957.

jr

I would be extremely careful about playing stereo records on an old (1950s or older) changer or single-play phonograph as found in old record players. The reason is simply that the stylus tracking force of these old players is far too high for today's microgroove stereo records. It is far too easy to damage the grooves of a stereo record forever and for good if such a record is played on a phonograph not designed for such recordings.

BTW, I once owned a tube-type Zenith stereo phonograph in the early 1980s, a trash find in my former neighborhood (my home town). It worked as soon as I got it home, didn't need a new stylus, new tubes or anything else; it just worked. Unfortunately, I got rid of it when I moved in 1999, as the apartment I moved to (and live in today) is much too small for a large antique radio collection, although I do have several solid-state radios (and two tube-type Zenith AM-FM radios) from the 1960s. An unmistakable tipoff that one of these radios was made in the early 1960s is the presence of Civil Defense markings on the AM radio dial, in the form of a stylized "cd" at 640 and 1240 KHz; the other Zenith radio, made around 1965 or so, not to mention my Zenith AM/FM transistor portable from much later, does not have the CD markings on the dial, since Civil Defense, aka Conelrad, was abandoned some time in '65.

I hated to give up that Zenith stereo phono because it worked so well, but I had no choice at the time. I never had any problems with it picking up strong AM radio stations, but then again the nearest AM station to where I lived at the time (1980s-1999) was a 500-watt daytime-only broadcaster some three miles away from my home. Where I live now, the closest AM station is about five miles from my apartment, and does not give me any trouble whatsoever as far as intermodulation or anything else is concerned. If I lived any closer to that particular AM station, which runs 1kw days and 500 watts nights, however, I just might have problems with intermod or other things caused by very strong AM radio signals. When I lived in a Cleveland suburb in the early 1970s, however, I did have a heck of a problem with a local FM station which came on on almost everything you can imagine--between local stations on all my radios and even on channel 6 on a color TV I had at the time, to name but two devices the station's 27.5-kW ERP signal was getting into. The reason the station was coming in so strongly was its transmitter was located less than a mile from where I was living at the time (I could see the station's transmitter tower from my third-floor bedroom window, and could also see the tower lights after dark).

That nonsense, thank goodness, ended for good when I moved back to my home town in 1975, and again when I moved to my present residence in 1999 (I am a lot further away from all the Cleveland radio and TV stations now, something like 45 miles, since the transmitters are located in a southwestern Cleveland suburb, and I live east of Cleveland by some thirty miles.) However, I will never forget the problems that station (then known as WLYT-FM, 92.3 MHz) caused me in the city in which I was living in the 1970s. I was never so glad to leave that city when I did (there were other reasons I left town as well), as my home town is about 35 miles from the local radio and TV stations serving Cleveland. Where I live now is a very small town 30 miles from Cleveland and 45 miles from any of Cleveland's radio or TV stations. However, as I said, I will never forget the problems that local FM station I lived so close to in suburban Cleveland was causing me. Thank goodness that station has since, as in a few years ago, moved its transmitter from Cleveland Heights to another Cleveland suburb, maybe 20 miles from its former location. Not that it bothers me in the least, as I no longer live in Cleveland Heights and never cared for the local FM station anyway, but I am sure when the station left Cleveland Hieights and moved to its present location, a lot of people breathed very pronounced sighs of relief.