This weekends estate sale finds........
 

Finally I found some nice color sets at an estate sale this weekend. I found all 3 sets at the same house, all in the basement. Luckily a nice clean dry basement of a non smoker home. I picked up an RCA combo from 1960. Couldnt say no, it would have been trown out if I didnt take it. Had all the manuals etc with it. (pictured in the b/w forum). Also found a 1968 sylvania color set. Great shape and it even worked! Last but certianly not least was a beautiful 1964 zenith roundie! I moved it away from the wall and there was all the paperwork for it underneath it! Finally a local roundie find! The zenith had a sticker on it for $5.00! The sylvania was $5 and the combo rca was free. Its funny, these old women are watching how excited I was to find these. They were telling me that they are all junk and should have been trown out before the sale to make more room. "you cant find the parts, they probably dont work, you're waisting your time" It was really funny when I had to bring the sets out into the open to see them and power them up. Everyone was mad because I was in the way and I heard all the comments "it doesnt work, its a peice of junk" I must have told 3 people that I repair TVs and I specifically look for these. Well, the zenith didnt work unfortnatly, but it was an easy fix when I got it home. It was a great weekend for tvs.

68 slyvania
 

This is probably as much hybrid as it will get. only 2 chroma tubes. Horizontal and vertical sections are still all tube. Everything else solid state. This is a pretty well made set.

The ultimate find!
 

I was so happy to find this set! Its like brand new. Still have every single original tube in it! Powered it up and the picture was a big blurr. Took the back off and noticed that the focus lead to the crt socket came off. Hooked it back up and beautiful picture without touching a single thing, even the color was perfect. I couldnt believe that the 6JU8 was still good! I replaced it anyway as they are a troublemaker in the zenith color sets. This set even had the manuals.

chassis
 

A 25MC33 chassis is in this set. Nice and clean too. Had the nice dry fluffy dust on the chassis. A sign that it was in a good clean enviroment all these years.

What an extraordinary weekend you had!

Three great sets for almost nothing.


The CRT's look great :)

Doug,

Great score! You just got the same Zenith I have. Here's a picture of mine. Funny, mine has a focus problem and it too is from/related to, a badly corroded focus connection pin in the CRT socket. Mine also is in very nice condition.

Here is the back of mine. Do you know the year of this model? I'm thinkig 1965-66.

thanks for the comps eric+rob!
My set has the dull grey screen, and its an original Zenith tube! Its a 21FJP22. All of my other zeniths have the BP22? A 25MC33 chassis makes it a 1965 model year, but production wise, it was built in 1964, atleast most were. I knew I saw a pic of this set before on ak! My remote set with the same chassis was built in 64. This set came with the manual and says "purchased December 8, 1964" The back of the manual is really cool, it talks about the future of premium channels, subscription television known as "phonevision" a 3 month trial in hartford, ct. Its pretty intersting as they talk about how now you dont have to go to the theather you can stay home and watch movies on your tv! I was going to scan the section about it incase nobody has seen it. Its in the operators manual on the last page.

CONGRATS
 

Great weekend. I'm not a TV type but l really enjoy the posts in this forum. You TV guys sure have a passion for your hobby. Wait l just had a thought ( that happens once in a while).;)

Question are TV types more inclined to like tube based stereos; or SS? Mine quess would be tubes but you never know.Anyways drh4683 pleased with your success.:D

Thanks for the comps bigmacc.

I am Definitly TUBE!!!! I like tube tvs as Ive tinkered with them for most of my life. I tend not to be into audio as much Ive got a sansui 1000A and thats as good as I'll get. I love it and dont plan on upgrading anytime soon!

Hi Bigmacc

I would have to say I'm a SS guy when it comes to Audio, unless of course there is a 6.1 Dolby Digital Tube Amp I can use with my DVD player :D (I bet there is for a price!)

Much more of a Videophile than an Audiophile.

I do enjoy listening to 45's and 78's on my old (1955) Magnavox
with the (4) 6V6 amp, but that's more about nostalgia than it is about sound quality.



Eric

tubes and sand
 

Some of my thoughts.

I have no interest in collecting transistorized TV's as a hobby, but the one(s) I watch on a regular basis have to be solid state because those are just so much more reliable from a MTBF standpoint. Imagine the tubed equivalent of a modern 61" RPTV. That set would have 300 vacuum tubes in it. It wouldn't run long enough before a tube or other component failed to watch an hour long TV show. I do not enjoy repairing SS TV's though and except for a set that is really valuable to me, won't take the time. Vintage vacuum tube TV's are fun to play with as a hobby. I cannot see where SS TV's would be fun to play with in the same way.

When it comes to stereo equipment, if I fabricate it myself it will be tubes only because I can get the best sound out of that topology given my engineering skillset and capabilities. If I'm just looking for commercially available equipment to listen to I will give both SS and tube a chance and settle on the one that sounds the best to me. I've heard good sound from SS, but for the most critical listening I'm convinced that my tube amps make better tone. For background music I deliberately use SS to save electricity as these amplifiers are more efficient of power use and tube components have a finite lifetime. When I sit down for a critical listening session where the best sound is key, I turn on the tube amps.

Summary,

normal use time = SS TV, SS sound

playtime = tube TV's, tube sound.

OK so I like to spend my quality time living in the past. :)

What i like...
 

I like the tube audio stuff, also. I have always liked tube stuff. I guess after more than 16 years of repairing the modern tv's and stereos, i am getting more of a passion for the old, well-built stuff. (I REALLY do not like the cheap, flimsy design of most modern audio equipment, with all of the flashing lights, big readouts, BUT NO DECENT AMP (usually ONE stk ic).) My favorite solid state audio equipment is 60's- 70' stuff, when there was actually a metal chassis that components were built on( like the old germanium transistor amps, in the old console stereos. I know many of them do not have a lot of power, but, i like their heavy-duty design.)

As for tv's I like the roundie color sets best, but the old solid-stast sets(pre 1975) are desirable to me ,also.I also like the pre-uhf bw sets, especially the cold chassis(power transformer powered) models. I just wish I could afford some of the good audio tube equipment,, but, right now, I can't.

By the way, an all-tube 61" projection set would need a lot more than 300 tubes, if you count all of the digital functions. It would probably need several THOUSAND tubes to duplicate all of the computer chips in the system control ckts alone. ( remember ENIAC had over15,000 tubes, and had only a few kilobytes of memory, no display, or character generator, digital -to -analog converters, etc.)Imagine the power consumption of such a device. You would probably need 50 amps at 230 volts of power, to operate it.(about what a dryer, and central a/c use, together). So, in our modern lifestyle, solid state definitely has its place, but I still love the old tube stuff.

GREAT score on the Zenith 25mc33!!

Re: What i like...
 

I stand corrected!

Actually I used to own an Eidophor 3-light valve color projector. I was hired to use it to do the 1993 CBC Gemini Awards show. That rig weighed about 3000 lbs and had almost 200 vacuum tubes. No digital display generation circuitry, just the basics needed to make a very, very good picture. Oh yeah, it needed a 60 amp, 230 volt feed to run. :eek:

Great sets, and I'm jealous! I NEVER find anything like that at estate sales. I'm laughing on how the "estate ladies" were. It's the same on my end. Everything I'm interested in they are amazed that someone would have interest. However..... the estate companies in this area tend to mark EVERYTHING high. I've seen some sets and I'm like "What the hell??" as some are marked really high, or priced at a dollar. I have yet to find a color roundie tho. You wouldn't want to sell one of the Zenith's would you?

Doug i hate you!:mad: Seriously though..great finds bud! I might as well face it..i'm going to have to move up north to get some of those goodies you guy's have been stumbling across. I havent been able to find any tubed tv sets around here at all...no less a tubed color tv. The ones that i do have i had to drive at least two hundred miles to get. I've done the paper and bullitin board thing and as of yet no replies. I have my RCA roundie color tv stereo combo but want another roundie to put in my den/office. You know how it is, once you have one roundie you got to have at least another...lol!
I had a Sylvania almost like yours but it must have been an older model because it wasnt a hybrid. The front and cabinet and knob arrangement was identical to yours though. I got rid of it when i was still a kid when a friend of the family needed a set. Its long gone now but remember it played great for years.
Tony

Doug, you really hit the jackpot on those estate sales. I heard some rumors that you might be headed up Detroit way??? Get in touch with me via e-mail, fifth89#yahoo.com, and maybe we could do some tradin'???

I like Doug's Zenith roundie. It brought back memories as we had one like that in our electronics lab in high school in the '70s, although ours was in a woodgrain metal table model cabinet. However, we never got our set to work (at least I never saw it operating). :( I'd hang on that set, Doug; they don't make them like that anymore.

No room anymore for TVs, but . . .
 

I don't know if anyone here can call what I have a collection, but I have two Zenith tube radios, K731 (AM/FM, 1959-60) and H511 (AM BC only, 1951). No room anymore for televisions (except my 1999 RCA XL-100, my main set, and a 1995 Zenith Sentry 2 in my bedroom) since I moved to a very small apartment nearly four years ago, but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I used to collect old TVs like crazy back in the late '60s until 1972. I had to give that hobby up in mid-1972 when we moved (years before I moved to where I live now), however. The story on all that is in one of my previous posts, so will not be repeated here.

I enjoy looking at the pictures of the old sets you guys have, though, especially the Zeniths (I've had a passion for anything made by Zenith Radio Corporation for many years). Doug's 25MC32 looks like a set we used to have in the electronics lab at the high school I attended (must have been a very, very popular model in the early '60s; seems like they pop up everywhere in this forum).

I am amazed that the only problem with that Zenith of Doug's was a disconnected focus lead on the CRT socket. That's great when one can get a set working with little or no fiddling, or just minor repairs. Many, many perfectly good TVs, radios, stereos, etc. wind up on treelawns every week just because of small, easily repaired problems such as disconnected wires, bad tubes or, believe it or not, just because the set's cabinet doesn't match the decor of the owner's living room (the last often happens immediately after a remodeling job). Many of the sets I had back at my former home fell into the "only thing wrong with it was/is a bad tube" category; one or two new tubes and I had a working set (I had a white Admiral 21-inch table model like that, only I didn't have to do a thing to it; I just brought it home, lugged it down to the basement, hooked it up to the attic antenna, plugged it in--and two minutes later I was watching a crystal-clear picture from one of the Cleveland stations).

Of course, there were the sets that had major problems; these I used as parts sets. I had a Philco Microgrid 390 21-inch console that worked (again, right off the bat, as soon as it was powered up) for quite a while, until the CRT base came off in my hand one day as I was working on the set. I managed to get it going again by soldering (carefully, so as not to crack the glass) the CRT socket leads from the chassis to the wires extending from the now bare neck of the tube. This got the set working for a short while, but one of the leads eventually broke off, ruining the tube (but not before falling across one of the other connections and making a small spark; to this day I don't know why that didn't blow the set's own line fuse, or the house fuse on the line to which the set was connected).

I cannot begin to imagine how some of you manage to have so many TVs in your basements, garages, etc. My collection was small enough to fit in one half of my basement, but the lists of sets some of you have (I've seen most of them) look as if, as at least one person has said here, you could open an antique television museum.

I hate to think, however, of the job most of you are almost certain to have if or when you sell your homes. I have read of cases in which the former homeowner has left old TVs in the basement, etc. after he/she leaves, but, IMO, such a course of action would likely be impractical for most of you, given the size of your collections. I had to give up all but three of my sets (a 1964 RCA-built Silvertone color roundie and a 1961 Philco 19-inch B&W portable which eventually became my main set, not to mention a late-1960s Sharp 12-inch monochrome portable) when I moved the first time, over thirty years ago.

Jeff,

I hate to read a sad story. You know that fellow that invented the phrase, "You can't take it with you"? You should go punch him out! :(

Yes you have a collection. :)

Jeff, I know where you are coming from. In 1990-92 I amassed close to 20 tv sets, maybe more? Over half were tube color sets (mostly rectangular) at the time these were showing up all over the place at the dump & all the used furniture stores. I remember the Sylvania with a bad cabinet but great picture-when it lost vertical deflection I thought the crt went bad so I scrapped it! There was the Zenith that sat outside a local store for a month in the winter before I hauled it home. Finally got it going, a great set. Eventually swapped the chassis into another Zenith I brought home with a better cabinet. That one had different yoke connectors. I must have spliced it halfway right because I got a raster! There was the Philco-Ford, one of the best tube color pictures I've seen. I traded it for a Truetone multiband radio! I remember a GE & a Bradford made by GE; several Admirals-they got worse as they got newer.

All that stuff was in a collection of buildings behind my mother's house (and in about half the rooms inside!) A tree fell through the roof of the largest building and Mom was getting fed up-everything had to go, and it did, sadly. I really miss a lot of those sets.

Tube vs. SS
 

Thanks for all the comments, guys; I appreciate each and every one of them.

I have all solid-state equipment here, except for two Zenith radios I scored on ebay. I have to say, however, that my Zenith K-731 AM/FM radio (1959 model, one of my ebay scores) sounds quite a bit better than my TV's audio and, in some ways, even my Aiwa bookshelf stereo with three-way speakers and 240 watts total output. I bought that Zenith more for the looks of the cabinet (the thing matches the furniture in my apartment just about perfectly) than the sound, although I do fire up the radio every now and then just to keep the capacitors formed.

The older TVs had much better sound than today's so-called "stereo" sets with their small transistor-radio speakers. I again reference a Zenith 23-inch monochrome console I had from roughly 1969 to 1972. That set was one of the best-sounding TVs I have ever heard in my life, second only to my late grandmother's 1951 General Electric console with a 10-12-inch speaker directly below the CRT. My Zenith had a 6BN6 quad detector, 6BQ5 output stage, 6x9 oval speaker, and a wide-range tone control. It sounded so good I patched an FM tuner into the audio system, as I mentioned in an earlier post. When you have a TV with a sound system this good, it's a shame not to share it with other hi-fi gear if you have it. (My grandmother's GE console TV had also been modified so that the audio from her Silvertone radio/phono could be run through it; I remember when I was a kid listening to it when she used to have it on, and that 12-inch speaker in her TV made the RP unit sound great.)

Here's a list of my current audio-video gear. Nothing fancy, but then again I like things as simple as I can get them (and I don't have the room in my apartment for anything more).


RCA F-19261 XL-100 19-inch color TV (audio patched through to my Aiwa bookshelf stereo; I use this connection mostly when I am listening to one of the music channels on Comcast digital cable TV)

Panasonic PV-4022 VCR


Aiwa CX-NA888 AM/FM/CD stereo, 240 watts, four-channel surround sound


Zenith H-511 Consol-Tone receiver, BC only, 5 tubes

Zenith K-731 seven-tube AM/FM receiver (honestly, it sounds so good it should have been in Zenith's Consol-Tone line, with its two-way speaker system, large speaker and heavy wood cabinet; this set sounds unusually good for a table radio, especially in the bass range!)

Wow! What a mess that must have been (and a question for bgadow)
 

I just reread bgadow's response to one of my recent posts. If he had many of his old TVs in outbuildings behind his mother's home, and a tree fell through the roof of one of the buildings, I hate to think of how much broken glass, etc. there must have been in the damaged building when the CRTs of those sets almost certainly imploded. I don't know how many of his sets were without their back covers, but if I were a betting man (I'm not), I'd bet any one (or all) of those sets had the CRT necks snapped off immediately (not to mention CRTs imploding right and left) when the tree wrecked the building. :eek:

Just out of curiosity, bg, how large was the building the tree hit? You said it was the largest one behind your mother's house. She must live on a lot of land, on a farm I'd guess.

BTW, what is the size and population of Federalsburg, Maryland, again just out of my curiosity? I don't know for sure, but I'd say, just as a stab-in-the-dark guess, it is a town outside Washington, DC or Baltimore, and not very big. (I live in a small apartment in one of those out-of-the-way places myself. The village in which I live is some 30 miles east of Cleveland, and has a population just under 3,200. The TV reception here is so bad you need at least basic cable just to get the Cleveland stations.) If you don't want to answer this question here on AK (I realize it is way off-topic for this forum), you can e-mail me at [email protected].

Kind regards,

Jeff, from my short time on this forum getting off topic doesn't seem to upset anybody! The building was not huge, maybe 16' by 16'? Was a screen house that had been built in. The roof and sides were covered in that translucent green stuff. Anyway, the tree really didn't tear too much up, but did enough damage to the roof that it wasn't worth fixing. I don't think any stuff inside got messed up, but really put me in a pinch. The other buildings were 8 x 10 affairs. Speaking of picture tubes breaking, I know of two that broke on me about that time. One was a JCPenney (RCA XL100) that was sitting on a stack of other tv sets in the doorway. I don't know why I had the back off of it-the door swung in the wind while I was standing there and was nothing I could do. I had a spare crt but never did swap it. I did take the busted tube and carried it up on the roof, on the end of the house there was about a 30 foot drop to a concrete pad-I had a terrible time carrying it up there, then dropped it on the pad. Why? Cause thats what guys do! Would have been lots more entertaining if the tube wasn't broke already, but then I wouldn't have had the nerve to carry it up there! The other broken tube: my best friend in school was living next to an auction barn-on their dump pile one day was this Zenith bw console from about 1960. I loaded it up in the truck, as soon as I rounded the corner it fell hard on it's side. No apparent damage and when I got it home it worked fine. Later had it sitting in this shed and after a very cold snap I walked in there and there was a big crack right across the face of the crt. I really should have tried it out to see if it still would work! I don't know if it was the fall, the cold, a combination?

As for Federalsburg, it is on Maryland's Eastern Shore-I am about 5 minutes from the Delaware line. Balt/DC are about a 90 minute drive on a good day. A good amplified rooftop antenna will bring the city stations in pretty well, though I use cable right now. The local stations on uhf come in clear with very little antenna. The town has a population of around 2500.

CRT's with integral implosion protection are pretty tough. I got one from the dumpster (sylvania) where the whole neck portion of the CRT was gone, there was about a 7" hole in the back of the CRT right behind the degaussing shield, but the stuff that was there was all intact. When I was a kid I hit the neck of a bad CRT with a shovel, no implosion, just a big hiss as the air rushed in.

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