I guess I have been fortunate thus far. I have had all positive reactions to my radio and TV collection. Poeple love to see the old sets and always ask "Does it work?". No one oustide the readers of this forum have seen my Zenith roundie yet but I bet it will draw a comment or two.

There was one time when I was at work negotiating with a coworker on the price of a Hallicrafters S53-A Shortwave "boatanchor" tube radio. The set was in fair condition but very restorable. Someone walked buy and said that piece of junk should be put in the garbage where it belongs. I tried to educate him on the value and functionality of vintage radios but it was a wasted effort. I bought the set for forty dollars, and eventually restored it. It has worked well for years and has become one of my best and favorite radios. Some people think that just because something is old, it must be of little value, functional or otherwise.

A lot of old gear today properly restored will still outlast some of the new unservicable garbage being sold at the chain stores. All my vintage 35 to 40 year old gear still works well. My PD65 CD player (a very good player) crapped out after 10 years. it can not be repaired. A processor is no longer available and nothing can be sustituted or modified to make it work.

Me, Myself and Irene
 

Before the advent of the internet, I though that my love for the old color sets was simply a weird tick in my personality. But the truth is that we are the keepers of the products and knowledge that layed the ground work for everthing that has come since in electronics.

Although most people don't understand my passion for the technology, they are amazed at the quality picture one of these jewels can deliver.

Strangely, the under-25 kids I've shown my collection to are mostly engrossed by the old record players in the couple of combo-units I have. It's always their highlight, the TVs come second and the radios don't get much notice -- unless there's a tuning eye. Most "under 30"s have never seen one, and they usually stop to ask what it is, and why, and I usually get a "kewl".

At some point in the last 25 years, TV's started powering off cleanly. When I show kids my '64 Zenith B/W, I usually get a comment about how dumb a B/W set that huge is. But when I shut it off the picture collapses to a horizontal line, then the line slowly collapses to the ol' white dot, then the dot hangs around for 30 seconds. That always gets a stunned silence. More than one kid has asked, "is it supposed to do that?". I'm sure most 25-year-olds have never seen it before.

The older people I show my collection to admire the nostalgia, and are always amazed the stuff "still works". I've never had a negative comment from someone my age or older.

I have gotten mixed reactions to my collection. Everything from "way cool" to "why do you have all this junk?" The two sets that get the most favorable comments in my collection are my RCA 2000 and my Zenith Sidekick. People like the Sidekick because of it's case being wrapped in denim, and the 2000 for its remote control, good sound, and digital tuning. I have a couple friends who are in their early 20's and they absolutely love my collection. One of them the other day told me he likes hangin out at my house because I "have all the cool stuff," and the other one really likes the RCA 2000 a lot, so much so that whenever we're lounging around watching TV or a movie or whatever, we always have to use that TV. :D

I have a beloved vintage Marantz receiver that I power up whenever I want to show someone what home audio is supposed to sound like, and that tends to get a lot of wows. Another hilite of my collection seems to be my Laserdiscs and CED's and of course all the record albums.

In my family, we always called it "the man with the flashlight in the TV". :)

Actually, the most negative reactions I've gotten are from older guys I've told I have old color TVs, who insist that the color looks bad on those sets, and simply won't believe me when I say it doesn't. I've been considering carrying around a picture of an early color set working just to disprove this idea. Where this idea came from, I don't know, I can only assume people used to watch color sets that weren't working properly, or needed degaussing, or had one weak gun or something.

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I don't have much experience on showing my collection to other people so far, as only a few elected people are allowed to go into my place. One time I had my cousin going in there, and he was more marvelled by my 1962 Philips-Mullard radio-phono combo. A friend of mine, who is a vintage automobile enthusiast ( he has a 1953 "Split-Window" VW Beetle ), is now infected with the "vintage TV bug" I passed on him. He always drools over my 1953 bakelite Admiral and my 1956 Philco console - in fact, looking at the Philco he always comments that it is a shame that they don't make TVs in that style anymore.

When I brought the Philco home, it sat for some time in my mother's living room, as it is just too heavy for me to carry it alone to my apartment ( which is located on the back of the property ). One day the ex-husband of one of my aunts saw the Philco and said that I should "transistorize" it, or put a modern color TV inside. I was horrified to hear it. I couldn't believe that a well educated person, with a degree on chemical engineering was saying such a blasphemy. I said that it was a historical piece, and that doing such things would ruin it's original status. I think he still didn't got it, he was still thinking that restoring an old, tube type B&W TV to work on it's original specifications was a waist of time. It's really difficult for me to understand such a line of thinking, even more because since he was born in 1938, I know that his early memories of watching TV are with a set very similar to that one.

Now that my aunt kept the house in their divorce, she might still have his sound system - it has one of the very first CD players - still working. I am thinking of giving her a call, to ask if she would not want to sell the CD player to me...

As for me ( born in 1977 ) I am fascinated with 1950's TV sets since I was a kid, when I saw pictures of those TVs in books, and when I saw that nice RCA Victor console on the movie "Back to the Future" . I always thought that they were much more beautiful than modern TVs, and since that time I wanted to have at least one.

I'm 27 now... and i'm NOT going to collect plasma or LCD HDTVs even when i'll be 57... and they will be vintage and rare... that's because i'm sooo fed up with seeing them everywhere now...

That's probably why some older people don't like tube TVs...

Francesco

Francesco, have you ever SEEN a roundie in person ? It's wild-Even better than seeing a bunch of old cars, or old antique furniture...

:yikes: There can't be too many of those tucked away forgotten on shelves... can there be? Sounds like you have a fairly amazing, world-class collection there. :thmbsp:

A few years ago a friend from India paid a visit. He saw my RCA B&W console (1957 vintage) and talked a bit about TVs. I turned it on, and he was amazed a little bit that it actually worked (albeit the CRT needs a brightner). I recapped it. We used to work together doing early HDTV R&D about 15 years ago.

He said something about similar TVs in India when he grew up there (he's roughly my age, so that would place it in the 60's to early 70's). Calcutta area, near Bengla Desh.

Emailed another friend (who is a hard core NY Yankees fan) a picture of the above TV set with a baseball game on the CRT. He was amused to see a modern baseball game (must be that games in the day used different camera angles, as well as no electronic graphics showing base runners, scores, the count and so on) on a vintage TV set.

No, i haven't seen one yet, there are very few roundies here, Philips and Zenith made some roundies with a PAL chassis for our market in the mid 60s, but they were very rare even back then, as just a few (extremely wealthy) people bough them to watch B/W only programming, with the hope to get color programming someday... and they waited until 1972...

The earliest color TVs you can realistically expect to find here are rectangular hybrid chassis sets from about 1972 when color programming started to appear, while solid state sets made in the mid 70s are still relatively easy to find...

most people here stuck with B/W until the early 90s and B/W sets were sold until the late 80s... with at least one hybrid B/W chassis being dragged on into the early 80s.

Francesco

While working on an alarm job at a new bank branch, I mentioned that I had brought back to life a CTC-4, and had obtained very good screen shots using DVD's of Technicolor films. This pronouncement was met with snickers from a fellow technician. Of course, at the time I had no screen shot pictures to show what the "old war horse" of a receiver could do. I now have a couple of photos with me.
I will try to post a couple of photos. The CRT is re-built, and has the original color gamut of the 21AXP22, no "A" suffix. Color reproduction can be almost breathtaking in a pitch black room (my basement)!
BTW: At maximum white on the screen, the X-RAY output measured through the safety glass with a radiac meter measured .4 milirems per hour, a rather high reading.
The current project is a CTC-11 with VERY LOW hours. Chassis is mint and super clean. Usual caps, etc replacement. Love working on old color chassis! helps fight depression.
Kevin

I only saw roundies in person TWICE in my life: both ocasions were on the collection of a friend of mine. Roundies are the RAREST OF THE RAREST of vintage TVs here, since brazilian television began in 1950, so roundies were on their last moments of production. Luckily, he began collecting TVs sometime around 1985, when people were still throwing those to the dump. He has some 15 roundies, which, for Latin American standards, is an EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE amount. Probably the most rare of his roundies is the Philips ( picture below ). He is lucky enough to have TWO of those. This TV was made in Holland in 1949/1950, SPECIALLY for the brazilian market. Oddly enough, the controls are in Portuguese, but not on Brazilian Portuguese but in the Portuguese that is spoken on Portugal ( and television in Portugal only began in 1957 ). The guys at Eindhoven thougt that the language was just exactly the same... Anyway, the first time I visited his collection ( in 1998, and I NEVER forget that day, it was also the same day in which I met and took pictures and autographs with Mister David Prowse, a.k.a Lord Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy ), it was the most WILD experience in my life, a true TIME MACHINE - he put a "Three Stooges" episode to play in that Philips roundie ( the one episode in which they wreck a TV set they had to install to a friend ); oh man, I REALLY felt like it was 1950 again!

That Three Stooges film is called "Goof on the Roof", with Shemp, Larry, and Moe. I wish it was on one of the DVD releases, but it is not yet, in the USA at least.

I get positive reactions from most of my family as they're used to them after 34 years of seeing them come and go(my brother got me started collecting t.v.s and radios when I was 4!). My wife, on the other hand was another story. She was of the opinion that with t.v.s and audio gear new was better and old stuff was all junk. After 10 years, I've managed to change her thinking somewhat on this. After seeing the picture quality on my CTC-15 and
the Zenith Space Command 600 I have, as well as hearing my console radios,
she now knows that the old stuff is of much better quality. But you should've seen her face when I first brought the RCA home!


Dumont-First with the finest in television.:yes:

Almost universally the reaction I've gotten is "Why do you keep around all this junk?"

Its kind of irritating.

David

agreed. makes me wanna hit someone....

I know what you mean. Up until 2 years ago, I had a 1967 Packard Bell 25" color TV I used in the living room everyday (98C15 chassis). Since my job requires people to use their brains, just about everyone thought it was pretty cool. Occasionally I would get the reaction when somebody brought their kid over, "oh my god, why keep that, it's like...old". It was in good shape, and ran great! I "moved up" in the world to a 1973 Zenith Chromacolor so the Pac Bell is in the garage.

But...
...That girl is a benvolent despot!:)