Quote:
Originally Posted by davet753
After many hours of listening, I finally decided this evening to crack open my H845 and change the selenium rectifier.
After I grabbed a nut driver, I realized that I had never taken this particular radio apart. Once opened up, it became obvious that this radio had never been taken apart.....ever...by me or anyone else. Everything inside was exactly as it left the factory. This is one of the very few sets I own that has all it's original tubes, and even the old wax capacitors and electrolytic filters. The selenium rectifier even has the Zenith name stamped on it. Surprisingly enough, it was just a little dusty inside. I decided to do a little cleaning on it and just button it back up.
I just got to thinking, it would be a shame to go poking around and updating parts in a radio that works and performs flawlessly and is still just as it was the day it left the Zenith factory in Chicago in 1961. I know 50 year old selenium rectifiers and 50 year old capacitors have to be closing in on their useful life-span, but as good as this radio performs, I think I'll just leave well enough alone.
BTW, out of all my old FM sets, the Zenith H845 outperforms all the others in sound quality, sensitivity, and selectivity. Even my favorite FM set (a 7-tube Westinghouse table model) can't hardly pull in as many stations as the Zenith....and this with the Zenith's older discriminator detector technology vs. the Westinghouse ratio detector circuit.
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Dave, I also have a Zenith 800-series radio, the C-845, from 1960 (probably a year before yours was made). Mine works extremely well for its age (brings in lots of stations using only the line-cord antenna, sounds great, typical Zenith) and I have no intention of replacing anything in it yet; I bet it still has its original selenium stack. One thing that impressed me about the '845 radios was the slug-tuned FM section (there is no FM tuning capacitor, although the AM section does have a 3-gang variable capacitor). I never saw an FM radio with such a tuning arrangement as the C-845 and its variants, but it works quite well. I am 35+ miles from the FM stations in Cleveland, and this radio pulls them all in just as if I were within spitting distance of the towers.
One thing that really impresses me with the C845 is its ability to pull in stations spaced closely together on the FM dial (as is common in metropolitan areas as well as when the FM band opens up in the late spring through fall). There is one such station in Cleveland, a classical-music station on 104.9, and a very powerful country-western station at 104.7. My C845 gets the classical station just fine with the AFC off, which is more than I can say for my other FM sets with fixed AFC. When Zenith made and marketed their 845 series radios (C/H/L-845), they had winners times at least ten.
As I always say about the older Zenith radios, they don't make them like that anymore.