What does collecting old tv's mean to young people?

[fsjonsey]

I'm 25. By the time I was 8 years old I became enamored with vintage radios. I blame my grandparents Depression era radio stories, dad telling me he had the first color TV on his street, and Ken Burns' Empire of The Air for that. By age 10 I had 20 tube radios ranging from the 1930's to 1960's that neighbors gave me, and my parents bought during our trips to the local antique malls. By age 12 I learned to solder and do basic troubleshooting using what I learned from the internet (Phils Old Radios). Since most of what I collected were basic AA5 radios, I got pretty good at recapping. That same year I flipped from radios to tube HiFi (I was getting into classic rock and Jazz) and fell in with a couple of guys who ran a vintage audio shop in Lakewood, OH that no longer exists. They sold my dad a restored Fisher 500B for $120 as a Christmas present, to get me into the hobby. That Fisher gave way to ever more complex tube hifi setups that evolved into the McIntosh/Leak/Altec system I run today. I bought my first vintage TV, a 1956 Zenith Bugeye, at an antique mall in Columbus, OH in 2007 with lawn mowing money. I recapped the set and it worked well, and later a fellow VK member sent me a new CRT for it some years later. College came, I got my first tube color set, a 1966 Zenith in 2011, and I still use it to this day. Now I own a recording studio that uses vintage analog audio equipment wherever possible, in a building filled with my collection of vintage TV's and Radios.

Basically, my attraction to vintage electronics is rooted in the fact that they were something totally different, that I never actually got to experience growing up in the 1990's and early 2K's. Tube electronics felt more real to me. Also the history- That we, as a nation, were able to do so much with technology that everyone today sees as completely archaic. The brilliant industrial design was also a factor. Seeing beautiful old radios and TV's when I was surrounded in a sea of black plastic electronics pulled me in.

[decojoe67]

I'm 48 and remember when, in the late '70's-early '80's when TV collecting was a very limited area of the radio collecting hobby. Period magazine articles on the subject would often start out with something like "people collect old barbed-wire, door-knobs.....so why not old televisions..." referring to it as being pretty odd. I personally was blown-away by the look of vintage TV's at the time, but focused on radios because of how odd it seemed to actually purchase an old TV. It took well into the '90's, when TV collecting got more wide-spread, before I finally started to collect what I liked the most.
I see vintage TV's as the closest thing to time-travel as you an you find, and everyone loves the idea of time-travel. Having an early dusty "as-found" TV restored, and the first time watching a period show on it, is a total thrill for me. All these years later, it has never gotten old.

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by decojoe67

"people collect old barbed-wire, door-knobs.....so why not old televisions..." referring to it as being pretty odd.

In the 69's TV show "Bewitched" Samatha had a relative Aunt someone who collected door knobs. Presented as something totally wacky, that no normal person would be interested in doing.... Later in the episode that this was mentioned, it was a plot device to explain a few missing doorknobs in Samatha's house...

You must be thinking of Canal Street

I remember paying too much for a POS reel to reel machine there back around 1974. 20 years later I had occasion to go there, along with a Chinese friend, and Canal St had become a Chinatown extension.