Unusual Midwest combo, you know where

[Whirled One]

Originally Posted by Sandy G

Midwest was sort of a "poor man's" E.H. Scott, w/their high tube count sets.IIRC, there was a kerfuffle of sorts in 1936-37, when it was discovered that in some of the radios that had high tube counts, several of the tubes weren't really doing anything at all, except to jack up the price of the radios...

This sort of thing apparently also happened for a little while just after WWII, but for different reasons. As radios started being made again for the civilian market, price controls were apparently put into effect that involved a ceiling price being put on radios determined by the number of tubes. There was an early postwar _Consumer Reports_ review of radios that identified at least one example of a minor-brand "6-tube" radio that was really a regular 5-tube "AA5" set in disguise, apparently as an attempt to get around the ceiling price and be able to charge more for the set. The article didn't detail how it was done, but I'd suspect there was a "twin" of one of the tubes in the set in which one tube section was wired through one of the tubes, and the other section(s) wired using the other tube, with the leftover sections on both tubes left unused.

Also, some of the various small imported transistor radios from the 60's included several "dummy" transistors that served no purpose except as a sales aid. [e.g. to be able to proclaim "15 Transistors" (or whatever) on the radio's faceplate]