Bad modern cheap radios with really bad performance
 

You've seen them, my brother had one someone gave him, a combo AM/FM/LED flashlight. Has very little selectivity, as if they didn't bother with a filter in the IF stage. Uses one of those AM/FM radio chips, so sensitivity is cheap, but you still need to spend a little more for a decent IF filter... :thumbsdn:

A LOT of 'em have "Crosley" written on 'em... Poor Powel must be flippin' in his grave...

The Chinese must produce hundreds of them hourly - I see cheapo giveaway radios all the time. Mostly with big insurance company logos....

On a port visit to the UAE, we visited Dubai, and on an excursion away from the gold souk, some friends and I visited one of their versions of a 5 and dime store. Everything in the place was less than 15 Dirhams (~ $4.50). Among the dozens of radios they had for sale were multiband "Sonny" and "Grundid" radios for 6, 8 and 10 dirhams, and these little clip-on FM radios with autoscan and earphones for 5 dirhams. No volume control, no on-off switch, just a scan switch that moves you up the FM band (not marked, but scans locally just fine). You plug in the earphones and it comes on. I bought three to play with - the scan up the FM band was quick and the reception was remarkably good, but mono. I tore one open to see the chipset, thinking it might be a TDA7000 knockoff, but no markings on the chip at all, nor any of the two or three surface mount transistors. I still have one of them - the battery is dead, but it probably still works. Really thin plastic case - fragile as can be.

I left the place after spending about 11 dollars (42 Dirhams) and got 6 multimeters (like those that Harbor freight gives away, with batteries and nice leads!), three radios, a half dozen white LED-based tap-lights, and a multipack of some really nice mint gum.

A buddy bought one of the little multiband radios for 8 Dirhams, and picked up just one station - on about 3 or 4 points on the dial. One IF can , one chip, and two diodes in the whole radio - for 6 bands? Pure crap.

The one Radio Shack I found in the mall there had a whole wall of power transformers - and they were ALL 120V primary! This in a part of the world where 220/240 is the line voltage. I thought that to be quite odd, if not stupid.

I buy them at garage sales and thrift shops for a buck or less, just the disect them. It's really interesting to see, what went into them.
Going back a few years, the GE Superadio, that we all know and love, uses the same Toshiba main chip, as even their lower end, small clock and portable radios. The main difference is the front end board and some of the components in the output stage, plus higher battery voltage.
The output stage is in that chip! The chip doesn't even have a heat sink on it!
Even though, the output stage seems to put out more than a watt. :scratch2:

Nothing was worse than those radios GPX put out in the 80's/early 90's.

What irritates me a lot more than a cheap radio performing badly, is how bad AM sounds on some more expensive modern units. For example, in a lot of modern cars, or in stereo receivers, it seems like it's nothing but a poorly implemented after thought.

How about Lenoxx sound? :D

I was discussing that topic at the last radio meet.
A fellow collector remarked that the sound is somewhat compressed at the station, for better results when using solid state transmitters????
I know someone could chime-in with a better understanding of this theory.
The AM on my Toyota Prius, doesn't sound that good.
I bought an older Japanese built HH Scott receiver, that was designed for better AM reception, as it has a three gang AM tuning condenser and tuned RF stage. :yes:

I think the problem has to do with frequency response. AM can have decent frequency response up to 10,000 Hz, but modern receivers roll it off at 5,000 and even lower. I think they basically expect that it will only be used for talk radio, and no buying decisions will be affected by a bad AM tuner, making quality a non issue.

Since AM radio in the US and Canada is now mostly talk, today's radio manufacturers probably don't see the sense in designing the AM section of AM/FM radios for high fidelity; the FM in most of these is probably not much better. I have a "Windsor" branded AM-FM clock radio that works well enough in my area (a small town about 40 miles from most Cleveland radio stations), but the AM isn't much better than a glorified crystal set. When I lived in the suburbs, I once had a Zenith integrated stereo system with an AM tuner that was so bad I was actually getting short wave around 1000 kHz at night; that system's tuner must have been as cheaply designed as the one in my clock radio, although the latter at least doesn't turn itself into a shortwave receiver after dark. Maybe living in a small town well outside greater Cleveland, with its much weaker radio signals, has something to do with it. :scratch2:

I've modified receivers and radios to have wider IF filters and thus better frequency response, to capture the 10KHz audio.
See http://pw2.netcom.com/~wa2ise/radios...tml#solidstate
where I change out the narrow ceramic IF filters with LC circuits or a wider ceramic filter (usually found in narrowband FM transcievers).

The problem with any cheap radio made in the past 2 plus decades sucks.
Selectivity,Sensitivity is in the toilet.Stereo separation is in the toilet if the radio is stereo FM.

I rather have a radio with 8 to 10 transistors then a radio with 100 plus in a chip.

My 1970's Kmart or Barkers 6 transistor specials or my 1970's Realistic AM/FM handheld will do better then any crap from today.

Speaking of cheap all in the one radios.I have a Totes crank up radio.It sucks big time on picking up stations even with batteries.I got it at Big Lots for $5 bucks.

The NICEST car radio I ever remember is the std AM radio that is in my '69 Lincoln. Wondered why, in '69, it didn't have an FM unit, too, but it didn't. It apparently was designed w/some thought as to how it would actually SOUND, which isn't that much of a concern nowadays.

Those 1980's Delco car radios were great for sensitivity on AM and FM.
I made up a Frankenstein type boombox with my old Delco pulled out of my old 1987 Chevy Caprice wagon and mound it into a wooden box with speakers and a cig lighter plug.I modify the radio with line outputs so I can do on the road radio airchecking and DXing with my digital recorder in my summer travels.

I upgrade it to a 1980's Delco AM Stereo FM stereo about 6 years ago when I found the AM Stereo unit at the local fleamarket for about $10 bucks.

The local AM station here is in Stereo 24/7 with oldies music.It sounds great.

Those car Pioneer Super tuners were good in their day too.

For maximum range at a given power consumption most modern transmitter rigs use DSP to compress the audio such that they can maintain 100% modulation (or as near to it as possible) almost constantly. IIRC PWM and other less than linear tricks are employed to reduce power consumption as well. It sucks for music, but in terms of keeping operating costs down (and thus pleasing corporate bean counters) it is a very effective system.

You said it! Those cheap AM-FM-FM stereo radios have almost no stereo separation whatsoever because the speakers are so close to each other. (In fact, the word "stereo" used to describe these sets means nothing; it is probably more of a selling point than anything else--and the stereo decoder, almost certainly a cheap integrated circuit, is probably as BOTL as you can get.) The only way you could hope to get anywhere near decent stereo separation from these sets is if you used them with headphones, and even then I'd have my doubts about the sound quality. I presently own two AM/FM/stereo FM radios that don't sound bad (the FM on one quit about ten years ago), but the radios are still nowhere near large enough to provide adequate separation. My Panasonic boom box is perhaps a foot or so long, but I am sure the stereo separation leaves an awful lot to be desired. I owned a Sanyo AM-FM-stereo FM boom box in the '80s which had the same problem, only the speakers were even closer to each other than my Panasonic's are--mainly because the Sanyo was in a squarish-shaped box, and the Panasonic boom box is in a much longer cabinet. I still wouldn't call the Panasonic box hi-fi, though.

Yes I agree .I think the 1980's into the mid 1990's was the last of good sounding boom boxes.I have two monster 1980's JVC boomboxes which sound great .

As I walk through BJs Wholesale or Walmart .Its sad just looking at those big oversize radios with 6 plus speakers that have no or alittle stereo separation.Nevermind adding the tuners suck too.Atlease they can add a stereo-wide switch to make it sound better.I probably have those Sanyo's and Panasonic's in my boombox collection.

Today people are now more interesting with those streamboxes or Iphone boxes which I see next to those so called stereo sets on the store shelves.

I have a sad feeling we will here in the states will end up with digital radio like Norway sooner or later.

I have a Sony Dream Machine AM/FM Clock Radio and several GE AM/FM Clock Radios all from the early to mid 1980s that have excellent tuners on them for what they are, they have nothing but line antennas for the FM Band and they are all able to pick up clearly stations that are 30-60 miles away from where I live, so I would have to say that not everything made within the past 30+ years radio wise was "cheaply made".

:yes:I would agree that analog tuners such as those on Sony's dream machine continued to improve well after digital was an option. I have one of those Sony's in a bathroom as the house alarm clock and I got it in 1986. It's sensitive seems to pick up whatever the e-skip favors - owing to a crowded FM band and the short monopole antenna I added long ago to replace the 24" wire hanging out the back. I also had an AM-FM/casette walkman that had an crude but fantasic tuner.

On the flip side, we had an Aiwa portable CD-casette unit with a digital tuner, detachable speakers, etc. With a cheesy dipole or outdoor antenna, the selectivity was awful, unheard of in a digital tuner. after casette, then the CD part failed it was exchanged for a tiny Emerson CD portable with a good ANALOG tuner:yes:.

Yeah, its kind of interesting that some of your older alarm clock radios which you would think would be horrible tuner wise were actually quite good for what they were especially the ones from the 1970s and 1980s the ones starting in the early 1990s got really horrible when it came to tuner quality, and then there's the case of an old late 1980s vintage Emerson AM/FM Clock radio that I had for a while that said on the cabinet "super sensitive tuner" on it but when you actually tried DXing on the thing it would only pick up strong local stations and that was it, it wouldn't even pick up any of the long distance stations (stations that were between 30-60 miles from me like my old 1980s vintage GE Clock radios did) so I think Emerson used some false advertising on their clock radios... :scratch2: :thumbsdn:

Emerson products for the last 40 years were a gamble. Some good, some so-so and a lot of it, lousy.
It seemed, areas near a Target store, there was a lot of Emerson products around.

Yeah but GE and Sony for sure were some of the better clock radios during the 1970s and 1980s as far as picking up reception goes.

It's some people that don't care about good reception and tone quality, just something to wake them up and listen to the local news and weather.

I found a 2002 Supersonic 5 inch TV/AM/FM radio,flashlight and fluorescent light in its box during my daily walk. It needs work in the power reg circuit as I see with the overloading.It has a one chip radio IC in it.

My "Windsor" branded AM-FM clock radio has about the worst tuner and audio quality I have ever heard, but it doesn't bother me since all I use it for is to make noise to wake me up in the morning. The selectivity is so bad that the local stations from Cleveland come in almost one on top of the other; a station about ten miles from here is so strong it almost drowns out a Cleveland station one MHz up the dial, but again, that's due to the poor selectivity factor.

As was mentioned earlier in the thread, these radios are not meant for high fidelity or razor-sharp selectivity, much less good RF sensitivity. However, I have owned worse sets. In the eighties, I had a Zenith integrated stereo with an AM tuner so bad I was getting short wave around 1110 kHz or so after dark, and my present stereo system, an Aiwa NSX-888 all-in-one, will pick up the local AM station, 1000 watts days/500 watts nights and five miles from me, at two points on the digital tuner: at the station's primary frequency of 1460 kHz, and 0.9 to 1 MHz down the dial (at 550-560 kHz) as well. (That station is a talk station I do not listen to, so the cross-modulation problem doesn't bother me.)

I wouldn't expect such a low-power station to overload my stereo's front end at just five miles, but the way these things are built nowadays nothing surprises me anymore. The FM digital tuner is just the opposite, failing to receive certain Cleveland stations in stereo, but I'm not surprised. Some time ago, I read one review of this particular system that stated the FM tuner is meant for use in strong signal areas, not in near-fringe areas such as the town where I live (I am about 40 miles northeast of most of the Cleveland FM stations, so the signals here aren't that strong to begin with). In fact, extremely strong signals will likely overload the front end, resulting in the same type of cross-modulation I mentioned earlier; you just can't win. :no: This type of stereo system would probably overload like crazy if I lived in a very strong signal area such as New York City or downtown Chicago, as most of the radio stations serving these areas transmit from one central location (the Hancock Building in Chicago and the Empire State Building in NYC) and, of course, the signals are extremely strong in the downtown areas of both cities. If you are close to either of these structures your radios will overload severely. VK member jstout66, in Nebraska, can relate to this as he has a 50kW AM station near his home that almost certainly overloads every radio he owns.

TV signals in both areas are likely just as strong, as they are transmitted from the same towers as the radio stations. In the early 1970s, I lived in a Cleveland suburb whose local FM station was only roughly a third of a mile from me (I could see the tower and its red navigation lights from my third-floor bedroom window after dark). The station's signal, on 92.3 MHz, was so powerful that it came in on channel 6 on my TV, between stations on a cheap stereo FM radio I had at the time, and even on an Ampex "Micro 88" solid-state stereo cassette tape deck my dad had. He was trying to tape a concert at our church one night, but couldn't due to the tape deck picking up the FM station's signal on the speaker leads; this gives you an idea of how incredibly strong the signal was at that location.

I *HAVE* a GE (General Electric) clock radio/phone which has to have the worst tuner out there. I *NEVER* listen to the radio on it. We have a 50,000 watt AM station and it overloads on that, and the FM can only pick up like 2 stations. If it wasn't for the built in phone, I'd shove a Zenith *CIRCLE OF SOUND* clock radio back in there.

Regarding the Windsor radios, they were give-aways at the bank, when you opened a savings account, around here, years ago.
They're always at the thrift stores. :thumbsdn:

I tend to buy older Realistic, Panasonic, Sony, and other brand Japanese radios from the old days. I love finding old Multi-Band radios.

Most of the ones I have picked up get excellent AM/FM reception. It makes modern radios look like junk. I have never messed with those radio on chip pieces of crap they sell these days.

I have no real "local" stations. I have a 6kW station on 96.1 in Lake Geneva, and it's transmitter is 8 miles from me, so even the worst radios get it. All they play is tween music, and stuff little girls would like. I have 95.1 out in Kenosha, it's 50kW and plays rock, and 30 miles away, I listen to them commonly in my car because it reaches so deep in to both Milwaukee and Chicago. I also think there is some religious station on 88.5 or something like that pretty close, but no one cares about those stations and no one listens to them. The programming is an abysmal so who cares.

As for AM stations. There used to be 1550 in Lake Geneva. A little 1kW station with two directional towers aimed east/west. They came in great, and I got the pleasure of them coming back on the air in December last year, and they played classic music and Christmas music. I had them on constantly on a little 1946 Arvin radio I own, it was a delight. They signed off January 1st, and the WZRK call letters were turned in to the FCC, so the station is dead.

I suppose for the best. The company that bought WZRK is a pathetic joke, they have another station in Milwaukee that plays only Gospel, and in my area there is zero market for such a station. I think they just killed it, and moved the transmitter up to Milwaukee for their crap station.

As for other close AM signals? WTMJ, WISN WBBM, WSCR, and WGN from Chicago & Milwaukee are the biggest locally. WSM from Nashville powers in here at night, so does CHWO or whatever 740 from Ontario at sunset, as well. Both nice to listen too on vintage sets.

I find a radio to be worthless if I can't hear Milwaukee on it in my house. It's made of amazing stuff if it let's me listen to Chicago in my house.

One of the joys of moving out of Omaha, NE was getting away from the overwhelming signals of local AM. Unfortunately, there was a trade-off of QRM (man-made noise) from all the wi-fi equipment. Getting a strong signal, particularly at night, means going to great lengths to out-power or null out the noise. The cure has been large ferrite bar antenna (preferably amplified). I have other plans afoot to try alternate means to null out noise and increase gain. Some are cheap; others aren't. Also, I have to consider the whims of the atmospheric reflecting layers. Signal can be fickle!

Not to get too far OOT, I bought a Jensen branded AM-FM desk clock radio, in the original box. It doesn't sound too bad on FM, but the AM can't be tuned to proper resonance. It's a synthesizer tuner and evidently it was designed for foreign countries, where the stations are 9KC apart.
It was intended for the US, 120 volt, 60HZ.
Must have been rejects, as the were sold at the JC Penney outlet store. :thumbsdn:

Apparently there is no external 9-10 khz switch on the radio, but did you check the circuit board for a strap (or possibly a low ohm resistor) that could be clipped or moved to the 10 khz position?

jr

I looked at the board, next to the PLL chip, but didn't see anything marked as such.
I can't see the chip number. It looks like it was marked over with ink or paint. I wanted to see the pin-out and figure it out.
It actually looks like an almost decent performer. It has a rather good sounding speaker and the output chip, has a heat sink on it. It seems to be a better looking piece of junk. :thmbsp:
Ordinarily, you should be able to look up the chip number on the I-net for the function and pin-out.

A few years ago, the radio world has it's most dramatic change since the introduction of the transistor. Silicon Labs began marketing an IC chip that consolidates about 75% of the typical radio onto a single chip, smaller than a postage stamp.

This can be good and bad. Tecsun manufactures some great portable all-band receivers. They can take one of these Silicon Labs chips (like a Si4820), add a decent RF amp to the front end, and audio amp to the back, and end up with a radio that performs great. I have a model PL606 ($40) that brings in FM and shortwave stations better than my 15 year old Icom (that cost about $800 in 2001). I just bought a $159 model PL880, and it blows anything I've ever owned out of the water, and sounds great to boot.

Sadly, there is a flip side to this. Some foreign manufacturers take these Silicon Labs chips and add very little to it, save for a cheap little audio amp chip with a plastic speaker. These sets perform like pure crap, mainly because there's not a decent front end.

These chips sell for less than $3, eliminate the need for manual alignment, and contain all the control functions needed in a radio (from band selection, volume and tone control, digital tuning, and all of it operating on only 3 volts with minimal current draw.

As to the 9 or 10 kHz question, that switching is built-in to these chips. Some manufacturers offer a way to switch this from the keypad, but if not, they have to be programmed manually.