Info needed on Blau table radio

[miniman82]

My Nephew thought of me when a friend mentioned having this radio, but I have no info about it and know nothing about the German stuff. Therefore, I defer to the experts. He wants to know if it's a rare thing, and would like some idea of it's value. I'm thinking like $50? No idea if he's trying to sell it or just curious, but he did say that it works well. It's a Riviera, 2643 is what it says on the back. Thank you.

[sean]

That looks like it should be a really good radio. According to Radio Museum it has 9 tubes and 5 speakers. I would gladly give $50 for it.

http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/blaupun...a_3d_2643.html

Here's a couple that sold on ebay recently:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...vip=true&rt=nc

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...vip=true&rt=nc

[Electronic M]

European radios tend to be designed for really good HiFi sound. Never owned a blau, but I have owned Blauplunkt, Grundig, Norelco, and Telefunken sets and all have really impressive audio quality.

[Sandy G]

$50 would about be a STEAL, IMHO...

[dieseljeep]

I'm not buying any more German radios for my collection. I have two of them now that have bad selector switches. The key board type. Evidently, someone used contact cleaner and it destroyed the plastics. The white plastic just crumbles.

[Jeffhs]

I wonder if the original Zenith Radio Corporation got a few ideas from Blaupunkt and other German radio manufacturers when the former designed their high-fidelity table and console radios of the '40s through the '60s. I am thinking in particular of the feedback winding on the audio output transformers in Zenith sets which, IMHO, makes all the difference in the world in sound quality (I have two Zenith wood cabinet table sets here that sound excellent). Did the German radios use the same type of transformer?

I had a Grundig 2168 AM/FM/SW table radio over 35 years ago that would have had excellent sound, I'm sure, but when I got it the cabinet was in bad shape (main speaker baffle board was separated from the rest of the set, and a chunk was broken out of the board that left a huge gaping hole in the top half of the cabinet, where the speaker was mounted -- not to mention the glass dial scale was gone) and two of the speakers were missing. I used the radio as a mono amplifier for an old '50s reel-to-reel tape deck I had at the time, but the radio itself quit about the time I bought my first stereo system in 1982. The radio in the Grundig set did not tune above 106 MHz or so; however, I did not realize at that time (two and a half decades or so before the Internet and VK) that the FM band on a lot of German radios (and European sets in general) stopped at 104-106 MHz.

I suppose if I had known a lot more about radio restoration in 1975 (the year I got the Grundig 2168 from a friend of mine), I could have had it working like a champ in no time, but since I knew very little at the time about the fine points (such as capacitor replacement) of getting the steam up in these old sets, not to mention having just moved back to my old neighborhood after going through heck where I was living before (long story and OT), I considered myself lucky to have had the Grundig working at all. As it was, I had the one remaining speaker connected to the set via the external speaker jack (with stripped wires rather than a plug, yet!), the EL84 tuning eye was flopping around loose in the cabinet, the dial was missing (as mentioned above), the knobs didn't match (the original knobs were missing when I got the radio) -- but hey, the set worked, if not in stereo and if not 100 percent in other respects. All I cared about at the time was that the set worked, and I played the heck out of it -- both FM radio and as an amplifier for the Webcor tape deck I mentioned.

I don't remember how well the AM or SW bands worked, or for that matter if they worked at all, as my interest in hi-fi radio at that time was centered on FM, again years before the Internet -- and the Grundig sounded great, even with just one speaker. Would have been even better if I'd had the two stereo speakers, one at each side of the cabinet; as I said, however, the set was in pieces when my friend gave it to me. The two stereo speakers had probably been trashed or lost years or even decades earlier. As I write this, I wonder just how well that Grundig might have worked had I restored it properly. Hey, I might have even held on to it -- I'm sure the Grundig 2168 is a classic today.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by dieseljeep

I'm not buying any more German radios for my collection. I have two of them now that have bad selector switches. The key board type. Evidently, someone used contact cleaner and it destroyed the plastics. The white plastic just crumbles.

You may not be able to restore the old switch buttons, but there may well be a supplier of antique radio parts somewhere (Radio Daze, AES, et al.) that might have reproductions of the buttons you lost. Alternatively, I'd look for a junked radio of the same type as yours, and use the keyboard buttons from that as replacements. The same advice applies if you need to replace the entire keyboard switch assembly, if such is damaged in any way or simply worn out from years or decades of use.

BTW, it looks to me, from your description, that whomever tried to clean those keyboard buttons on your radios with contact cleaner used far too much of the stuff if it ran onto the white keycaps. Contact cleaner used in moderation (just enough to wet the contacts) will not or should not attack plastics anywhere; it's only when someone blindly sprays the stuff into slots, etc. without watching what they are doing that they run into trouble with crumbling plastic and the like.

[miniman82]

Originally Posted by Electronic M

Never owned a blau, but I have owned Blaupunkt.

Dork! Blaupunkt! It's the short version, lol! You college kids crack me up.

[dieseljeep]

Originally Posted by miniman82

Dork! Blaupunkt! It's the short version, lol! You college kids crack me up.

I thought you were refering to a cheap East German knockoff they called a Blau.

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by miniman82

Dork! Blaupunkt! It's the short version, lol! You college kids crack me up.

I wondered if you had shortened the name, but I wasn't sure. I don't know all the names of the AMERICAN radio makers let alone all the European makers so I assumed that a Blau company may have existed and my assumption was proved in the post below yours.

It is stuff like this that makes me really annoyed at what cell phones... or more specifically texting has done to our culture and language in that many lazy typists abbreviate or acronymize the the living crap out of things to the point that one can have troubles finding evidence of the language of their writing (and sometimes speech) let alone deciphering the meaning of the message. I assumed that you were well above that and took your writing too literally.

I happen to suck at typing myself, and given that what you mocked was posted the day before my last final exam and my mind was so f'd up I was having troubles sleeping and remaining asleep after getting to sleep (it is hard to sleep when you start having nightmares of tests and studying, and have the elevator like music you use to drown out distractions during the finals get stuck in your head keeping you awake when you need to sleep) it is a miracle that I was together enough to attempt to post something cogent.

[Jeffhs]

I just did a search on Google for "blau" and found out that one of its meanings (several were referenced) is the word "blue" in the German language.

I did not, however, see any references to radio manufacturers named simply "Blau" (there were references to music publishers by that name, as well as to "Radio Blau", a German Internet radio station), so in the context of the post we are discussing it may well have been just a non-standard abbreviation for Blaupunkt.

BTW, as ElectronicM pointed out in his post, there is a lot of (too much, IMO) shortening of words in contemporary American speech and writing these days; we have, in large part if not totally, the huge popularity of text messaging (not to mention tweeting) to thank for that. It's a trend that isn't likely to end or to reverse itself any time soon, at least as long as tweeting and texting are as popular among teenagers and young adults as they seem to be at this time, so we'd better get used to it.

Thankfully (if this is any consolation), however, there is a ban on texting while driving in many U. S. states. This is not yet a national ban (though, IMO, it darned well should be), so there are still many areas of the country in which it is still legal to tap away on a cell-phone keyboard while behind the wheel. I saw on television about a year ago, to my surprise, a report of a young woman who actually was texting on two cell phones at once, and trying to drive her car at the same time -- and steering the car with her knees!

Good grief! Didn't that person realize what a heck of a risk she was taking? The instruction manuals for most if not all cell phones have (or should have) a warning against texting while driving. The warning in the instructions for my own TracFone cell is simply (in paraphrase) that one's sole responsibility while driving is and must always be to the road ahead. If a call arrives while you are driving, let it go to your voice mail, and if you must make a call, pull off to the side of the road before dialing and talking once the other party answers.

If more people read and heeded this warning, there would be a heck of a lot fewer fatal car crashes on America's roads caused by ignorant cell phone users. I'm sure a lot of this comes from teenagers who think "it will never happen to them" as far as automobile accidents are concerned; kids of this age think they are invincible and can get away with darned nearly anything, including fiddling with a cell phone when they should be focused on the road on which they are driving. I bet most teenagers would change their habits in a hurry if they had an accident in which their father's car (which the teenager was driving) was totaled because the kid was trying to send a text message while behind the wheel. The father would almost certainly hit the roof and likely would take the kid's car keys away, for weeks or months if not forever -- if the teen's driver's license was not suspended or revoked first.