Show us your vintage B&W sets!

[Jeffhs]

Originally posted by Tony V

The cool thing about this one is that when you flip the switch to phono, it turns off everything but the audio in the tv so no looking at a snowy picture while playing records. Nice finds! I like the cool swivel legs on the Motorola! Very retro.
Tony

Most TVs of early '50s vintage with phono inputs were set up to shut off the video circuits, even to the point of blanking the raster, when the record player was in use. I've seen a few of these sets in over thirty years of electronics experimenting, and even owned one. The one I owned was a 16" 1951 b&w roundie Majestic; the phono-radio switch was on the front panel, smack-dab in between the volume/contrast control and the tuner. My folks' first TV was a 1954 RCA Victor console like polaraman's (ours had the speaker at the side of the cabinet and two decorative vertical metal bars at the base, where the speakers are in his set), also with a phono input (we also had the matching 45-EY-3 45-rpm record changer, which sat atop the TV of course).

Speaking of the 45-EY-3 changer, I had one when I was a kid (the model with an integrated amplifier; the volume control was on the right side of the case, IIRC). The thing got pitched when we moved in 1972, again IIRC.

I know now, 32 years later, I should have kept the unit for the antique value of it, but I was just a kid then (16 years old). Besides, we were in a hurry to move, so a lot of stuff went out with the trash--including my 45 changer and a basement full of old TVs (including the Majestic roundie). Hated to part with those sets, especially a 23" Zenith b&w console I had rescued from a neighbor's trash and retubed from the ground up about three years earlier (it had no tubes in it except the HV rectifier and CRT when I found it), but again, I had no choice.