The massive 1975 Zenith combo has arrived...

[Jeffhs]

Glad to know that your Zenith console made it from Oregon to Chicago unscathed. It was a good thing the trailer the set was in was covered, if you say it was raining cats and dogs the day it arrived at your house.

I am nothing short of amazed that Zenith had built the stereo section of your TV on a PC board, with the television set itself being hand wired. If they hand-wired the TV, I would have expected the stereo to have had point-to-point wiring as well. I could never understand why they went back to PC board construction for their radios even as far back as the Royal 500 series of the 1950s. I have a Zenith R-70 AM/FM portable radio, made in 1980, with the entire set, except the speaker and controls, on a PC board; however, my 1958 Zenith Royal 1000 Transoceanic portable is hand-wired, with a metal chassis and plug-in transistors, and it is heavy as the dickens even without batteries. Strange that Zenith would abandon point-to-point hand-wiring after all their years in radio and TV in favor of PC board construction; with the reputation for quality their hand-wired sets had earned over that time, their reversion to PC boards seems to me like a step backwards.

Does your set have the original CRT? If so, it must have been one of Zenith's best. Until now, I had never heard of or seen any TV set with a 36-year-old CRT that still works as well as yours seems to. The screen shot of the weather forecast (looks like it's from The Weather Channel) on your set looks great, almost like new. That's why I doubt that the TV has the original CRT. If it is in fact the original tube, the set's former owners must not have used the television much, except perhaps for the evening news. It is also possible that they gave up on the set when DTV arrived in June 2009, before ATSC->NTSC converter boxes were available.

BTW, I wouldn't change anything in the stereo tuner/amplifier if it is working well (unless, of course, you are troubleshooting the problems with the one weak stereo channel and the inoperative tone control, as I'm sure you are or soon will be). Speaking from experience, modifying or trying to improve a radio, TV or anything else that is operating perfectly well can, and often does, lead to big problems, with the unit operating worse (if it works at all) after the modifications than it was working before you started.

[DaveWM]

if its like other zenith combos the TV does NOT use the tuner amp, but rather has a cut out switch the disconnects the speakers from the amp and switches to the TV based audio (and may or may not kill power the the stereo tuner/amp). On mine I made up a a new wire harness that bypassed that and just drove a small interanl speaker (there was a place for on) from the TV audio and left the main spearker connected to the amp. this way I could power up the amp and drive the L and R directly from my video source. it REALLY makes for a nice setup with that powerfull amp in true TV stereo sound. I would just use the tape inputs. I left the small speaker hooked up so you would just leave the TV volume turned down. I did not want to have the audio stage unloaded. The entire process was just done by the new wire harness, I even left the old one in place so it would be easy to return to the orig setup, if for some reason that would ever by desired.

[Carmine]

I would be interested in how to do that conversion too, because I think all of my germanium transistors are shorted in my Emperor.