[Jeffhs]

Those GE Coaxial sets were excellent when they were new. I had relatives in Georgia who owned one (theirs had power tuning as does this one), and theirs pulled in signals (three stations at that time) from Chattanooga, 50-some miles away (my relatives lived in Dalton), using, if I remember correctly after all these years (I was just a kid, no more than perhaps eight or nine years old, when they had this TV), a large Rembrandt all-channel rabbit-ears antenna. The pictures were great and the sound was unlike anything I had ever heard before in a TV set, probably, even likely, owing to that huge oval speaker in the base of the cabinet and perhaps a powerful audio stage, with a couple of push-pull 6V6 tubes.

As I always say about Zeniths and will say now about the GE Coaxial TVs, they don't make them like that anymore. The Coaxial is one of the first TVs I've ever seen with a speaker that big; another was my grandmother's 16" GE console, with an equally large speaker in the base of the cabinet, directly below the CRT, and yet another was my Zenith K-2739 console which had a large 6x9 oval speaker in the same location.

GE should have put a switch in the audio stages so the amplifier and that huge speaker could be used with an external phonograph turntable, or with a changer like the RCA 45-EY-3 45 RPM one; no sense using all that fidelity just for TV sound, IMHO. My folks had an RCA Victor changer like that which they used with their 21-inch RCA Victor TV. That phono jack was a standard feature, or so it seemed at the time, of RCA's 1950s-era televisions; several other manufacturers may have taken them up on the idea before the end of the decade, as many other makes of TVs and radios had the phonograph input on the rear apron of the chassis, with a switch to select radio or phonograph either near that jack or on the front panel, as part of the volume or tone control or as a separate slide switch. Today's flat screens have RCA jacks to permit connecting them to an external stereo system, but even then the sound cannot possibly hold a candle to the excellent sound quality of the old '50s console TVs. Once again, they don't make them like that anymore.