[Jeffhs]

I have three wood-cabinet Zenith radios I would not give up for anything. As others here have said, today's solid-state transistor sets cannot hold a candle to the older radios, the latter being made, in most cases, with all-metal chassis and well-designed circuitry. The sound of these older sets is better than the new one-chip radios as well. My Zenith C845 (the radio shown in my avatar looks almost like it) has two speakers, an 8" for low- and midrange and a 5" for highs; the radio also has tone and loudness compensation, a true tone control that alters the response curve of the entire audio stage, not just cuts down the highs as do the tone controls in today's cheap portables (those that even have tone controls at all), and the cabinet is made of solid wood (my other two Zeniths, K731 and MJ1035, have solid-wood cabinets as well).

I like the sound and the looks of the cabinets of all three of my Zeniths, although at the moment the MJ1035 has an issue with the volume control (resulting in very low, almost inaudible sound, but the radio works very well otherwise, bringing in loads of stations just using a hank of wire on the FM antenna terminal). These radios were built for long-distance reception and excellent sound quality today's cheap plastic portables cannot hope to match. The C-845 works very well and also sounds 1000 times better than any of today's cheap sets, which is why I intend to keep all three sets as long as they work as well as they do. I also have a Zenith H511 table set (the "racetrack" model, so named for the shape of the cabinet) that was made in 1951, and still works quite well; no hum, good sound and quality construction, qualities for which Zenith radios (and later, televisions) were known for decades.

These radios, not to mention my Royal 1000 eight-band portable and R-70 AM/FM set (the latter very likely having been one of the last quality Zenith portables--it's built like a tank, even though the entire radio is on a PC board) are keepers as far as I am concerned. I don't know what got me so interested in collecting these, but I'm glad I did start a collection seven years ago. These radios represent a level of quality (of build and sound) we will never see again, in this age of outsourcing, offshoring and manufacturers of almost everything these days being much more concerned with their bottom line than with the quality of their products.