Audition tube radio

[Hemingray]

I think I've found the older cousin to radiotvnut's transistorized Audition.

This sucker has 7 tubes, and four speakers. Unlike any radio in my collection, this has not one, but two 12DT8s in the FM tuner section. Works real beautifully, and has quite big sound for just having an AA5 based SE amp..

[radiotvnut]

Nice! That's the only tube radio I've seen under that brand. I wonder if this is a Japanese built radio? I think I remember reading that JVC made some of their better radios.

[Hemingray]

I suspect it is. all the tubes in it are labeled TEN/Rincan. 50C5 has a moderate H-K short but it still sounds real sweet.

Interior image: Really spacious in here, all the tubes are secured with small metal clips.



Update 2/9: Ended up replacing the 50C5 after it began randomly breaking into fits of "music-eating hum". It's now running on an RCA 50C5 with no more random blowing hum

[AUdubon5425]

Very nice. First tube Audition set I've seen too. Which store sold them...was it Grant's?

[radiotvnut]

I think Woolworth sold that brand.

[holmesuser01]

Originally Posted by AUdubon5425

Very nice. First tube Audition set I've seen too. Which store sold them...was it Grant's?

If not mistaken, Grants sold stuff under the Bradford name.

When they went belly-up, the local Grant's store gave me all of the tropical fish they had in their pet department. I had to go home and get several large containers, and set up a couple of extra tanks, but I did get them all. It was sure better than flushing all of them, like the store people were planning to do... My dad and I had a blast with all the guppies having babies...

[Findm-Keepm]

Your radio is most likely a Fujitsu - they used to market radios as Fujitsu-Ten. We always called them "Fudge-Ten" radios, because they used copious amounts of thread-lock paint, often brown in color. Your radio seems to use the white paint to extremes. Fudge-Ten is still around, marketing car audio stuff.

Cheers,

[Jeffhs]

I didn't realize, either, that Audition made tube-powered radios. I remember the Audition radios being sold at a Woolworth store near my hometown years ago, but all those sets were solid state.

I had a feeling that this radio had been made in Japan, because of the very small transistor-radio speakers being used as tweeters and the larger ones as low-frequency transducers. As to the brand, I wasn't making the connection at first, but the TEN/RICAN tubes in the set should have been an immediate and unmistakable tipoff that the radio was manufactured by Fujitsu-Ten. I don't know, however, where the Rican fits in.

I'm at a loss to explain why this set uses two 12DT8 tubes in the FM front end, but I'll throw out a guess or two. The first thing that comes to mind is that the second 12DT8 may be a dummy tube, put in just to inflate the tube count and to have the buyer believe he or she was buying a super-sensitive radio, when in reality only one of the tubes was actually working. Another possibility is that the second 12DT8 is an RF amp/converter tube for the AM section, but I don't believe a radio this new would have an RF stage on AM. That stage was dropped from most AM radios after about the '50s, when 50kW AM stations started up in major cities, and smaller towns, miles (in some cases hundreds of miles) from large cities were putting up 250- or 500-watt local-service dawn-to-dusk stations. As these smaller stations became popular, the days of AM-only radios with RF stages were indeed numbered; therefore, I seriously doubt (though it is possible) that a radio made in the early to mid sixties would have such a stage ahead of the antenna. Even respected companies such as Zenith had done away with the AM RF stage by then. The C845 was made and marketed for the 1959-60 model year, with the MJ-1035 series following and being marketed between roughly 1961 and 1965 (both of which had AM as well as FM RF stages), but I have a feeling that these sets were among the last to use such stages, due to the higher operating power (generally 25 or 50kW) of big-city stations, and the increasing popularity by this time of low-power small-town/suburban daytime stations.

[Hemingray]

Not sure if it is an RF amp, it does a fine job on AM but is really picky about it's antenna on FM. stringing it upto a small lamp hanging from my ceiling allows it to pull in 94.3. Even local stations (like 98.3, 103.3, etc) are also weak on it unless I string it's antenna a specific way (and 103.3 is a massive 100kW station two counties away). Beginning to wonder if said 12DT8 is indeed a dummy tube.

[Chad Hauris]

I have one of these radios...I think the 1st 12DT8 may be for FM RF amp and AFC and the second one FM mixer and oscillator. On the single tube FM tuners one triode in the 12DT8/12AT7 tube is usually the RF amp and the other triode half the mixer/oscillator. I think mine has a schematic on it so I can double check what the functions are.
I have also seen this same radio under the Masterwork brand.