[Jeffhs]

I just looked at the schematic of your set and found an RF amplifier stage directly ahead of the antenna. Many table sets of this vintage had RF stages, as not every city or town in which these radios were used had local AM radio stations. Because of this, the sets had to be built for long-distance reception, and were often used with outdoor antennas in fringe areas. Yours should work very well for AM DXing, although with only one IF stage it may have issues with separating powerful stations on the dial, say 1100 and 1110 kHz, especially if one station is 50kW and the other is much weaker.

I second the suggestion as to putting a larger speaker in the cabinet. If the radio sounds good with a 5-inch speaker, replacing it with a 5x7 or even an 8-incher will improve the audio quality quite a bit, especially in the bass range. The cabinet looks as if it should accomodate up to an 8-inch speaker, so I'd say go for it. The improvement in the sound quality will be well worth the effort.