Quote:
Originally Posted by dieseljeep
I made a mistake on my entry. They had one of those lousy repro cathedrals, either a Crosley or a Thomas. Some rediculous price, $12.00 or $15.00. I wouldn't pay 10% of that.  |
Lousy? Don't sell those replica sets short; some of them may be junk, but others might well be excellent performers. I have one, a replica of a 1934 cathedral radio, that works and sounds great. The only thing I can't figure out is why the FM tuning scale is so spread out on mine, as it uses a simple plastic tuning capacitor for AM and FM tuning, not a varactor or slug-tuned tuning system. Regardless, this radio works excellently, even in this semi-fringe area 40 miles away from most Cleveland FM stations. The wire FM antenna came disconnected from the radio somehow, but the set still works, bringing in every local FM station. The sound is great, owing to the 4-5" round speaker with a large magnet and a wood cabinet. I think I only paid $20 or so for this set at a discount store in my hometown. One of the speaker leads came loose from the PC board chassis, but I can fix that in five minutes flat; in fact, I am sure that is all that's standing between me and a really good sounding radio (for what it is).
I know my Zenith C-845, K-731 and Royal 3000-1 will run rings around it as far as sound quality goes, but as I said, for what it is, my little replica cathedral set doesn't sound half bad. It even gets a station my other radios don't get at all: a classical music station right next to (on the dial) a powerful country-western station about eight miles from me. The classical station is on 104.9, while the country station is 0.2 MHz down the dial at 104.7. This radio has full-time AFC, which one would think would pull the tuning toward the strong station, but on my little set it doesn't seem to work that way.
