Do you still use your old radios

I always say that I will play these old radios I collect, but I seldom do. Every now and again I have a time warp experience with one - I listened to a baseball game on a Detrola recently.

I am hoping to drag a very nice sounding Zenith table model from 1959 to work and maybe listen in my office sometimes. It sounds sweet - has a little electrostatic tweeter - but it distorts quite a bit at anything over low volume (probably not due to malfunction but due to design). I wonder what the youngsters will make of that. To them streaming audio off the internet is hi-fi!

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by schoolboy

I am hoping to drag a very nice sounding Zenith table model from 1959 to work and maybe listen in my office sometimes. It sounds sweet - has a little electrostatic tweeter - but it distorts quite a bit at anything over low volume (probably not due to malfunction but due to design). I wonder what the youngsters will make of that. To them streaming audio off the internet is hi-fi!

Which model Zenith is that? I have a K-731 with an electrostatic tweeter which sounds fairly good at the volume levels at which I use it (can't play it too loud because I live in an apartment building). Somehow I can't quite believe any of the older Zeniths distort as much as you say yours does, unless there is a problem somewhere, such as an electrolytic filter cap beginning to go sour. I certainly do not think Zenith actually designed any of its older radios to go into distortion at anything less than extremely loud volume (these sets were designed with quality in mind from the '20s through about the '80s, the latter being the last decade in which Zenith produced radios), but then again any radio of any make or vintage will distort badly if it is operated at such high volume. Keep in mind as well that an amplifier driven into distortion will oftentimes produce more power than that for which it was designed, which could damage the speaker(s).

I wouldn't sell Internet streaming audio short if I were you; some of it sounds fairly good. I run the output of my computer's sound card through my Aiwa 200-total-watt bookshelf stereo and get good sound from Radio365 and RealOldies1690.com, the latter being the Internet webcast of an oldies radio station near Chicago, the former being a streaming Internet radio station with several different music formats available. In fact, I don't use the speakers that came with my computer at all anymore. I think the reason streaming Internet audio sounds so poor is that most of the time people listen to it through their computer's own tiny speakers, which were never designed for high fidelity. Kids today may think this is "hi-fi" because they may never have heard a real high-fidelity music system in operation; keep in mind as well that, by their mid-teens of even younger (!), many youngsters have ruined their hearing forever and for good by listening to loud rock bands at concerts or at high volume through headphones or speakers over their own stereo systems. Listening at very high volume through headphones is particularly damaging to human hearing, since the transducers are right next to the listener's eardrums. The small stereo headphones furnished with personal stereo units often come with warnings against listening at high volume levels for any length of time, for just those reasons. I have a small FM scanning radio with headphones that can probably blow your head off (it distorts like heck long before the volume control gets anywhere near maximum, though) if the volume is turned up all the way; my late-'80s GE boom box is like that as well. Both sets are capable of more than enough volume to damage one's hearing forever; fortunately, I don't care for really loud music anyway (anymore; I am almost 49 years old), so have never run either radio (and certainly not my stereo system or any other radio I own) that loud. Thinking about loud music and teenagers reminds me of a song by the '60s West Coast surf rock group The Beach Boys; the song is titled "Dance, Dance, Dance" and begins, " After six hours of school I've had enough for the day/I hit the radio dial and trurn it up all the way" I bet that kid's hearing was ruined long before he reached the age of 18.

BTW, I notice you are near Cleveland, Ohio. Are you right in the city or in a suburb? I ask because I grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Wickliffe and recently (as in just over five years ago) moved to Fairport Harbor, in east-central Lake County. I don't want to go into details, but the basic reason I moved to where I live now was to get away from the suburbs (Fairport Harbor is located just about ten miles east of the last true suburb of Cleveland).