[Jeffhs]

Personally, I think Zenith made some of the best radios around, until they went out of the radio business entirely in 1982. Their last radio, IIRC, was model J430W, an AM/FM wood-cased set with slide pots for tone and volume, a tuning meter, and a little gadget on the back they called a "bass booster"; the last was probably little more than an air chamber. I don't see how it would improve the sound one bit.

I have three wood-cased Zenith radios, all from the sixties, that would run rings around today's cheap portables from an RF sensitivity and sound quality standpoint. Two of my sets have RF amplifier stages (for AM as well as FM) ahead of the antenna and are very sensitive, pulling in stations 50-60 miles or more away; contrast this against today's belt-clip stereos (probably AM/FM and mp3 these days, though I can remember the original Sony Walkman that had AM/FM stereo radio and a cassette player) that use the headphone cord as an antenna and probably cannot get stations more than a few miles away (read in urban and near-suburban areas).

That Japanese "Consul Deluxe" table set shown in a previous post looks to me as if it was cobbled together from spare parts. The knobs don't match, the underchassis wiring looks sloppy, and so on. I agree with toxcrusadr, who said that you'd probably have to be right next to the station's towers (almost literally) for this little thing to work. I hate to think how this radio would work in a fringe or near-fringe area; probably not very well if it worked at all. It certainly is not the kind of radio to use for any kind of AM DXing, not to mention the shock hazard (probably no isolation whatsoever between the AC power line and the chassis). For that reason, I would think at least twice as well before connecting an external antenna to this radio. I realize many AC/DC radios of the '40s through the end of the fifties (some even into the early sixties--I've owned a few) had an external antenna terminal on the back cover, but these were isolated from the chassis with a small capacitor. I would definitely replace that cap before even thinking of connecting an external antenna to any AC/DC radio of the vintage I mentioned a few dozen words ago--it is probably (more than likely after 50-60+ years) defective and worse than nothing as far as line isolation is concerned.

The design of radios such as Arvin's model 540T (1950s vintage) leaves a lot to be desired as well. The 540T was a metal-cased 4-tube radio that worked well enough, but the fact that it was housed in a metal cabinet presented a shock hazard if the line-isolation cap was defective or failing; even then there was a possibility of a dangerous shock if any part of the radio came in contact with earth ground, the isolation network notwithstanding.

I don't think the 540T, or any other metal-cased AC-DC radios of the 50s, were sold in any great volume because of the shock hazard. The sets were cheap (in terms of 1950s money) and their performance reflected that fact. The isolation network (if any) between the AC line and the chassis was, at best, probably just one capacitor, but these radios were so cheaply made that the manufacturers probably just put in enough line isolation to meet (in some cases just barely) electrical-code standards in effect at the time.