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Originally Posted by lightfoot44
Just listened to my Elgin R1750 9 band shortwave today......It still sounds as good as the day I bought it.!!!
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I didn't know anything about your Elgin radio (I had never heard of this brand being associated with anything other than clocks until now) until I read your post, but it seems like it's a good one--much better than the cheap portables coming off the lines in Korea and other offshore locations these days.
Do you have pictures of that radio? I'm sure a lot of us here, myself included, would be interested in seeing what it actually looks like. It sounds to me as if your set is built and performs every bit as well as the Zenith Transoceanic radios were and did, respectively, even if the Elgin was made in Japan for an American company, as was stated by yourself or another poster to this thread.
You said the Elgin sets may have been in competition with the TOs, so it wouldn't surprise me if the Elgin radios were built to the same exacting standards. The statement that the Elgin R1750 was built "like a Sherman tank" would indicate to me that the manufacturer must have taken great care in designing and building it to very exacting standards indeed, something we very rarely if ever see in radios or much of anything else coming from the Orient or other offshore locations these days.
I would hold on to that Elgin radio as long as possible It seems to represent a level of build quality in portable radios we will never see again, as I have stated many times in regard to early Zenith radios until the company went out of the radio business (sets of 1920s to early '80s vintage). That the Elgin R1750 may have been a competitor against Zenith's Transoceanic line of radios indicates to me that the two companies may well have been rivals, trying to outdo each other every chance they got. And while we're at it, let's not forget one model of Silvertone (Sears) multiband transistor portable that looked an awful lot like the Transoceanic.
These companies may have tried to imitate or copy the TO, but the latter were one-of-a-kind sets; the phrase "often imitated, never duplicated" comes to my mind as I write this. There never was and never will be another all-band portable radio as good as the Zenith Trans-Oceanic sets were. If Elgin (or the company that actually made these receivers) were trying to make a portable radio that rivaled the TO, Elgin had one strike against it right away if their R1750's main chassis is a PC board with the transistors soldered in place; all Zenith TOs up to the Royal 7000 were built on solid metal chassis, with socketed transistors to boot.