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Old 05-24-2010, 09:13 PM
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Jeffhs Jeffhs is offline
<----Zenith C845
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Fairport Harbor, Ohio (near Lake Erie)
Posts: 4,035
I agree with DaveWM -- those are two excellent finds, especially the '66 Admiral. I don't see too many Admiral TVs these days -- I wonder how popular they were when they were new.

I didn't notice, either, whether that particular set has a remote. Looking at the front panel of that console, however, I couldn't help but notice the resemblance between it and the 25" portable TV in Oscar Madison's apartment in the '70s TV sitcom The Odd Couple. I have VHS tapes and DVDs of most of those shows and can't make up my mind whether the TV in the apartment is an Admiral or a Zenith -- but after seeing your Admiral console, I'm thinking the set in that show was an Admiral but I am by no means certain. The set had a remote that clicked, so it may well have had Admiral's Son-R (pronounced "sonar") full-function wireless remote control system.

With all the TVs you're finding, I bet you'll have your work cut out for you for some time, and I don't mean maybe. Besides the sets you've shown us here the last couple of weeks and these two, I think you may also have that bunch of sets you had back at your parents' place in Batavia, unless you put some or most of them on eBay or CL before you moved.

I hope you have enough room in your new place for all those TVs, plus the ones you found last week and showed here today. This all reminds me of when I was collecting old, cast-off TVs in suburban Cleveland, back in the late 1960s-'70s. My basement was full of old sets, some working, some barely working and some I just kept around for parts and tubes. My pride and joy in those days was a 1963 model 23" Zenith model K2739 b&w console in one of the nicest wood cabinets I'd seen in a long while. Found it on a curb in my old neighborhood in 1969. No tubes left in it, except the 1J3 HV rectifier and CRT--someone must have filched them all before putting the set out for the trash.

I got the set home, put all new tubes in it, and was rewarded with an excellent picture when I turned it on about a month later (that's how long it took me to get all the tubes). This set had a 6HA5 RF amplifier tube in the tuner, three video IF stages and a sound system I have not seen in any TV set since. The sound channel in this set was a 6BN6 gated-beam discriminator, 6BQ5 audio output, a tone control, and a 6x9 oval speaker with a rather large magnet. The sound was so good I patched an old FM tuner across the volume control and used the set as a hi-fi FM radio as well; I am amazed that Zenith didn't put a phono jack with input selector on the rear apron of the chassis, or a TV/phono switch on the tone control. Maybe they (and probably all other TV manufacturers of the period) had done away with the phonograph input by the '60s.
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Jeff, WB8NHV

Collecting, restoring and enjoying vintage Zenith radios since 2002

Zenith. Gone, but not forgotten.

Last edited by Jeffhs; 05-24-2010 at 09:21 PM.
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