I wonder if the original Zenith Radio Corporation got a few ideas from Blaupunkt and other German radio manufacturers when the former designed their high-fidelity table and console radios of the '40s through the '60s.
I am thinking in particular of the feedback winding on the audio output transformers in Zenith sets which, IMHO, makes all the difference in the world in sound quality (I have two Zenith wood cabinet table sets here that sound excellent). Did the German radios use the same type of transformer?
I had a Grundig 2168 AM/FM/SW table radio over 35 years ago that would have had excellent sound, I'm sure, but when I got it the cabinet was in bad shape (main speaker baffle board was separated from the rest of the set, and a chunk was broken out of the board that left a huge gaping hole in the top half of the cabinet, where the speaker was mounted -- not to mention the glass dial scale was gone) and two of the speakers were missing. I used the radio as a mono amplifier for an old '50s reel-to-reel tape deck I had at the time, but the radio itself quit
about the time I bought my first stereo system in 1982. The radio in the Grundig set did not tune above 106 MHz or so; however, I did not realize at that time (two and a half decades or so before the Internet and VK) that the FM band on a lot of German radios (and European sets in general) stopped at 104-106 MHz.
I suppose if I had known a lot more about radio restoration in 1975 (the year I got the Grundig 2168 from a friend of mine), I could have had it working like a champ in no time, but since I knew very little at the time about the fine points (such as capacitor replacement) of getting the steam up in these old sets, not to mention having just moved back to my old neighborhood after going through heck where I was living before (long story and OT), I considered myself lucky to have had the Grundig working at all. As it was, I had the one remaining speaker connected to the set via the external speaker jack (with stripped wires rather than a plug, yet!), the EL84 tuning eye was flopping around loose in the cabinet, the dial was missing (as mentioned above), the knobs didn't match (the original knobs were missing when I got the radio) -- but hey, the set worked, if not in stereo and if not 100 percent in other respects. All I cared about at the time was that the set worked, and I played the heck out of it -- both FM radio and as an amplifier for the Webcor tape deck I mentioned.
I don't remember how well the AM or SW bands worked, or for that matter if they worked at all, as my interest in hi-fi radio at that time was centered on FM, again years before the Internet -- and the Grundig sounded great, even with just one speaker. Would have been even better if I'd had the two stereo speakers, one at each side of the cabinet; as I said, however, the set was in pieces when my friend gave it to me. The two stereo speakers had probably been trashed or lost years or even decades earlier. As I write this, I wonder just how well that Grundig might have worked had I restored it properly. Hey, I might have even held on to it -- I'm sure the Grundig 2168 is a classic today.