The CTC-5 Made it to Germany already!

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

I've always liked the "look" of German products-and the "feel". The old Grundig & SABA radio sets of the 1950s-'60s all had a VERY substantial "feel" to them-and generally, they sounded quite good, too !! My Rohde & Schwarz EK-07 Boatanchor-all the knobs have this ultra smooth, almost "buttery" feel to 'em- sorta like "everything's turning in oil". An R-390A Boatanchor, by contrast, feels, well..."agricultural" by comparison. The wooden mask on that TV is pure class, IMHO. We lost a LOT when black plastic became our god...-Sandy G.

Before one year, when our daily used Tv set was destroyed by a powerline defect (powerline had 400 volts instead of 230 volts) I tried to buy a new tv set wíth a wooden mask but it was impossible. Only plastic sets are available. I like that old wooden sets, mostly those from the 1950s. I have one old Grundig b/w tv tabletop set with a radio in good condition, which was already often photographed by photographs for journals and newspapers because of it's wonderful design. Saba made also excellent radios and sets, I own a Saba Meersburg 7, which might be one of the best, easy to service. But in the 1960s radios and tv sets become more and more plastic parts and they aren't as beautiful as before.

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...ig/type349.htm

Originally Posted by roundscreen

Transformer park, thats funny. Can you tap the 230v step down transformer to 120. purchase an american 120v auto transformer and plug it into the 230 stepdown transformer and then turn up the auto transformer output to 110. That way you do not have to worry about 5u4 arcs and surge voltages, etc.
My mains put out 122v here if i plug my ctc5s into the mains with out a variac the 5u4s put on a light show and the flyback gets hot.{ctc5s transformers sold in the us are rated at117v}Your set has a vary nice picture. Alot of work to get them going.
German electronics are well made. I have 2 Grundig radios. They were easy to fix and
sound great.

Thank you very much for that advice. Without it I had buyed one in Germany. But to buy an U.S. type on ebay might be the better way. Attached a photo of my Grundig tv radio tabletop model in a German journal.

[RetroHacker]

Wow. Wow... That Grundig television is absolutely beautiful. I always have loved the styling of the Grundig sets, with the big slide-rule dial scale and large knobs, and the piano key switches. I'd never seen that in a television before, but I like it I've got a Grundig console hi-fi with a very similar tuning scale and layout, and I love it. It sounds wonderful on the phono, but the radio plays weak. I just need to get off my butt and replace the caps in the circuit... Can't complain though, I found the console on the side of the road, waiting for the garbage. Hard to believe someone would throw out something so beautiful, but I guess people would much rather have the cheap, Wal-Mart crap these days.

As for the styling of newer European sets, with the black band around the tube, from what I can tell, it's just that they mounted the tube such that the entire glass section sticks through the front, rather than cover up the edges with a bezel like the American sets. I actually kinda always thought that looked neat, at least on some of the 60's/70's B&W 12" sets. Never seen one in person, only in pictures, but since that sort of 12" plastic portable set is so common here, and they all have the same basic design, having the entire tube visable makes it look a little more interesting. Never been able to find one like it here though, something tells me I won't. Doubtful that anyone moving from Europe to the US would bother bringing along a cheap 12" black and white television, only to have it be totally incompatible with the US systems...

-Ian

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by RetroHacker

Wow. Wow... That Grundig television is absolutely beautiful. I always have loved the styling of the Grundig sets, with the big slide-rule dial scale and large knobs, and the piano key switches.

piano key switches: well spoken! In Germany we call it in a common manner the "Gebissradio" (= the set-of-teeth-radio)...

Originally Posted by RetroHacker

As for the styling of newer European sets, with the black band around the tube, from what I can tell, it's just that they mounted the tube such that the entire glass section sticks through the front, rather than cover up the edges with a bezel like the American sets.
-Ian

This was very modern in my childhood. Everyone wants such a breathtaking set, and everyone want to touch the screen and feel the curves of the glass... ;-) Here is a color tv set with a bezel and a sticks-through crt:

http://bs.cyty.com/stjakobi/unskirch...-Jakobiz74.jpg

(this PAL tv set has a color *and* a tint control!)

and the first Telefunken solid state portable (with a delta-crt):

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...inBetrieb2.JPG

Grundig used the same crt-type. They didn't stick it through the cabinet but used a bezel:

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...2000TDvorn.jpg

Not as beautiful as the elder models was the second Telefunken color tv:

http://bs.cyty.com/menschen/e-etzold...inBetrieb2.JPG

On the website of Marcel van Grinsvens TV-Museum you can see a lot of european sets (this is - in my opinion - one of the largest documentation of european early tv sets on the web, but the site is completely in dutch language. Marcel doesn't understand English, it's very difficult to communicate with him. But his website is worthy to visit:

http://www.marcelstvmuseum.com/

[RetroHacker]

A lot of really interesting sets at Marcel's museum, interesting how different trends in design evolve. I do rather like the look of the fully exposed CRT face, probably because it's so different. I've never seen an American TV like that. That second Telefunken color set is a very nice looking one, I like the clean lines and the balanced design. Another thing I've noticed is that it seems to be more popular in the european sets to have the controls mounted lower, and the speaker above them - exactly opposite most American televisons, where the controls are normally mounted closer to the top of the set. Another big difference in the apperance of the European sets is the lack of tuning knobs, something that persisted in the US until the 80's. Nearly every American TV from the 70's will have two knobs, one for VHF (Channels 1-13, and a position to select UHF) and one for UHF (14 - 83). My guess is that the European sets didn't have to worry about dealing with such a large number of channels, so pushbutton tuning was practical even without digital tuners. I'm not familliar with the TV system outside the US, I know that most of Europe uses PAL, and France uses SECAM, but I don't know about the channel allocation. Just, from looking at the sets, there are six pushbuttons on that Telefunken, so what, six channels?

Now, that's not to suggest that the US has more channels, we just have more channel numbers. To prevent overlapping transmitters in different areas, the stations are spread around the band a little. It's not uncommon to only be able to pick up three channels in an area, and a couple weak UHF stations.

-Ian

[yagosaga]

Originally Posted by RetroHacker

Another big difference in the apperance of the European sets is the lack of tuning knobs, something that persisted in the US until the 80's. Nearly every American TV from the 70's will have two knobs, one for VHF (Channels 1-13, and a position to select UHF) and one for UHF (14 - 83). My guess is that the European sets didn't have to worry about dealing with such a large number of channels, so pushbutton tuning was practical even without digital tuners. I'm not familliar with the TV system outside the US, I know that most of Europe uses PAL, and France uses SECAM, but I don't know about the channel allocation. Just, from looking at the sets, there are six pushbuttons on that Telefunken, so what, six channels? -Ian

In the 1960s and 1970s we only had three tv channels, they were ARD, ZDF and the third (culture) channel. But ARD and ZDF were the main channels. (The second tv channel, ZDF, came in 1963.) Some people near the border to other countries could get even five or six channels . In my region we had the two GDR channels too, but could see them only in b&w, because the early PAL sets had no SECAM module. Channel range is VHF with channel 2 - 12 and UHF with channel 21 - 69. Our channel width is 7 Mc from picture carrier to the picture carrier of the next channel.In 1984 we got commercial tv, today we get 25 channels (commercial and national broadcasting), our tv system (on the air) now is dvb-t, and I convert it to PAL or to NTSC.