Quote:
Originally Posted by anden
Jeff, thanks for the info - I've recently been on a 1950's -60's Zenith jag. Another interesting aspect to the these Zeniths is their point to point hand wired chassis. Many other makers had adapted the printed ciruit boards which were trouble prone. I also have a K731 (legged version). Do you know what the cost of a K731 was back in 1963? I do know that the H845 went for $129. which was a good chuck ofd money back then.
Some kind of flash-back has inspired my recent interest.....Back in 1973 when I was 12, I inherited my grandmothers H845. I remember my friends being very impressed at the sound it produced...after all most of us kids only had little Radio Shack radios and had not experienced the World of Zenith yet. Only a big German set can out perform them, but these ran up to $300.
It's nice that prices are generally low - but they are one the rise.
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I'm not really sure what the K731 sold for when it was new, but judging from the fact that Zenith made so many of them between about 1958 and 1965, they couldn't have been that expensive.
I am not the least bit surprised that the C/H-845 series sold for $129 when new in the late 1950s through about 1961; after all, these radios were built with quality in mind, as were all Zenith radios (and TV sets) of that era. (The MJ-1035, a hi-fi stereo receiver by Zenith with a stereo phono input, sold for close to $200 when it was new, but it, as well as the '845 series and most of Zenith's other hi-fi radios from the '50s and early sixties, can be had for very low prices these days on ebay.) The '845 series had a true tone control, a two-way speaker system and enough audio output to blow a person clear out of the room if run wide open, not to mention signal-grabbing power that most of today's radios cannot match. The '845 series had a 6BJ6 RF amplifier tube that worked for both AM and FM, as well as two IF stages for both bands, so I'm sure these sets sold well in far-suburban and even fringe reception areas as well as near-suburban and urban reception environments. I now live in an area where the AM and FM signals are not exactly weak, but not as strong as they were when I lived in a Cleveland suburb. No matter. My C845 (and also my MJ1035) pull in every major Cleveland FM station using just a 6' length of wire on the FM antenna terminal; when the band opens up in the summer, the FM dial just lights up with stations from one end to the other, again using only indoor antennas.
You are correct in your observation that the prices of these older radios are rising, even on the used market. The MJ-1035 can still be had (for now, anyway) for the proverbial song on ebay and other auction sites (sometimes, however, without the extension stereo speaker), but I read on an antique radio website recently that this was only due to the fact that the MJ1035 is a relatively unknown ("sleeper" is the term used on the site) receiver, in spite of its high-fidelity sound, above-average sensitivity on AM and FM (the latter owing to an RF stage [half a 17JK8 on FM and a 12BA6 on AM] and two IF stages on both bands), and so on. Anyone would be hard-pressed these days to find a table radio with equal or better sound than any of the better Zeniths from the '50s-'60s, except for the large German sets (Grundig, Emud, Korting, et al)--but again, as you said, those German radios cost an arm and a leg, even used. I read somewhere recently (I think it was here in AK, perhaps in this very forum) that the German sets had excellent fidelity, albeit perhaps with exaggerated bass, and they weren't exactly station grabbers by U.S. standards, but they were built with quality not seen in American electronics today. I was given a Grundig model 2168 by an old friend about 30+ years ago; the radio was in bad shape at first, but when I got it back together again (with only one speaker; from the looks of the cabinet, however, the set probably originally had three, two at either end of the cabinet with the main driver at the front, above the tuning dial, and may have been set up for stereo FM to boot, though I could not see any kind of stereo indicator on the front panel) it worked fairly well. I connected an old Webcor reel-to-reel tape deck to it and had a nice little mono audio system the six or seven years the radio lasted. It gasped its last breath in the very early '80s when the FM tuner quit, but no matter--by that time I had bought a new solid state Zenith integrated stereo system.
Darn!...I should have held on to that Grundig; who knows, it might have been worth something today. I don't know how much the model 2168 would fetch on ebay, for example (especially in the sorry shape mine was in; no dial glass, the EM84 tuning-eye tube flopping around loose at the left end of what should have been the tuning dial, the missing stereo speakers . . .) but one never knows. I could have listed it as a parts set and gotten a few dollars for it--that is, if I had known about the Internet and ebay then (was ebay even in existence in the early 1980s?).