Quote:
Originally Posted by anden
Jeff, Try a speaker upgrade on the B100, like a smaller 2 way with an 8" woofer...it really improved the sound on mine. Motorola sold these with speakers that were too small in order to have compact packaging and to keep the price at $129. They're a classic from the short lived tube stereo era.
I forgot to give credit to the Zenith MJ1035, though I don't yet own one, everything I've heard about it has been positive... having a pair of 8 inch speakers, plus two tweeters, its sound would have been about as good as it got in 1961 for a tabletop set.
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I think one other thing that gave the early stereo FM table radios an edge in performance as far as sound quality was concerned was that a lot of them were in real wood cabinets, which were very large and heavy. The shape of the cabinet has a lot to do with sound quality as well. The MJ1035 has a mellow sound to it that is probably due, at least in part, to the shape and size of its cabinet; the chassis takes up almost all of the bottom part of it, but the rest is wide open so this set has sound quality today's bookshelf systems would be hard-pressed to match (although some of them come pretty darn close; my Aiwa bookshelf system has specially-designed 3-way speakers that sound really good, especially when reproducing instrumental music, IMHO).
The old console stereo systems/three-way entertainment centers by Zenith and others had excellent sound as well, again because of the huge cabinets in which they were housed and because of the huge main speakers most of them had. Before the Aiwa system I had a Zenith four-mode integrated stereo system with Allegro 100 floor-standing tuned-port speakers in real wood cabinets; that system sounded wonderful, the fact that it had been manufactured in Korea notwithstanding. My present system sounds great to my ears, but I have a feeling it could have had a rough time matching the sound quality of the Zenith's two-way tuned-port speakers if I were to A-B it against the Zenith system today. The Zenith was only 5 watts per channel, while my Aiwa system has four 50-watt amps--two stereo channels and two amplifiers for surround; the heck of it is, however, I've had this system eight years and never once even tried the surround feature. My best bet, should I ever get a yen to try my system in surround mode, would probably be to look around on eBay; I often see odd speakers and such there almost every time I look. Most of the time the speakers are attached to main units I wouldn't be interested in, but who knows? As I said, someday I just might come across a pair of Aiwa surround speakers (just the speakers) at a reasonable price on eBay; when/if I do, I just might get them and see what my system is made of, even as old and out-of-date as it is.
Keep your eyes open on eBay and CL for a Zenith MJ1035. These radios aren't as popular (yet, anyway) as the C845s and Zenith's other wood-cabinet high-fidelity sets, but they do show up from time to time. When you do finally get one (and if you do, be sure it has the matching extension speaker; on many MJ1035s up for auction on eBay the extension speaker is missing), I can say you will not be disappointed in the sound. These old sets are built like tanks and sound many times better than today's small portables available at dirt-cheap prices at Wal-Mart and elsewhere. The Zeniths in particular had an edge over other manufacturers' sets of the early '60s because they were built on solid metal chassis with point-to-point wiring, rather than on printed-circuit boards, although Zenith finally broke with tradition in 1980 when they introduced the model R-70 AM/FM nine-transistor portable (unless some of their earlier transistor sets like the Royal 275, 300, 400, et al., all of which predated the R-70 by 20 years or more, also were built on PC boards; I think, if I remember correctly, the Royal 500, which was probably Zenith's best small transistor portable of the late '50s [I had one for several years and enjoyed it a lot], also was built on a PCB but with socketed transistors). The R-70 was built almost entirely on a PCB, although the construction seems every bit as solid as if the set had a metal chassis. The R-70, like the Royal series of Zenith TransOceanics, doesn't eat up batteries by the dozens, either. My R-70 is only on its second set of batteries since I got it (it was an eBay score a couple years ago) and still sounds excellent; my Royal 1000 was also won in an eBay auction perhaps three years ago and is only on its second set of batteries as well. It would probably still be on the first set I put in it after I got it, except for a short in the AC adapter jack that drained the batteries in no time flat (I'm amazed the battery box did not melt in the process as well--that's how hot those CZ [carbon-zinc] D-cells got; I hate to think how hot things might have become in that battery box had I had alkaline D-cells in there when that adapter jack shorted
).