Who made the best/worse tube radios

[Telecolor 3007]

Who made the best/worse tube radios?
Was the nickname "Garbage Electric" (which was applied to "G.E. (General Electric)" tv sets) given to "G.E." radios too?
One of the worsest tube radios that I've seen in my entire life where the Romanian ones. They had to be cheap, so with the exception of a few models (those made by "Electromagnetica" in 1954-1960 and some made by "Radio Popular/Electronica") they where quyte bad...
Don't be afraid. In Western-Germany they made some bad radios too. They experienced with some tubes, that where uncomon and now they are hard to find. The dumbest of the West-German ideea was to made that thing called ECLL 800 (in order to make radios smaller); that thing wasn't bigger than an EL 84 (6BQ5) and it was overheating; if the thing that was hard to find isn't enough, it is almost imposible to replace it with something else. "Telefunken" made an amplifier using EL 34 (6CA7) tubes... the bad thing was that the tubes where mounted on printed board, and the printed borad melted

In Eastern-Europe, the best Hi.-Fi. tube radios where made in Eastern-Germany (G.D.R.) and Soviet Union. "Tesla" made Hi.-Fi. some radios using some very hard to find tubes.

[mr_fixer]

The worst radio i ever had, I think it was a Philco. But it was only the ones that used Loctal tubes. A loctal tube has a aluminium base with a locking pin, the force required to remove the tube would most likely break the socket. I'm sure other companies used loctal tubes but the Philco was the first and last that I ever owned that had any. Logan

[radiotvnut]

GE made some pretty trashy tube radios from the mid '50's through the late '60's. Many were a pain to work on, especially the AM/FM models from the '60's and many suffered from "silver migration" in the IF transformers. The PC boards were nothing to write home about and the tube sockets were not great, either.

[bgadow]

Such a wide range of radios have been made, it's very hard to come up with a 'best' and 'worst'. Since Philco was mentioned, take a look at their lineup: some outstanding sets, particularly in the thirties. Lots of mundane stuff, like those loktal based series string sets. (I always kinda liked loktals; they always sound like they will break something when you remove them, but if you do it right they work fine. Adds character!) Later they had some very cheap junk, clock radios and that sort of thing, but it wasn't the worst on the market. The junkiest I can think of were: early 30s "midgets", no-name sets with resistor line cords, they just scream CHEAP. Another example would be the first Japanese imports, some of which looked more like cheap toys than an actual radio.

GE? Has always been an expert at making perfectly average merchandise! This country is still swimming in mounds of GE All-American Five, white-plastic radios and clock radios. They got so clever that some have no screws holding them together, they just snap together. They look average, they work average. Plain vanilla. The snooze button was redundant!

[Marantz7t15]

I've read that some Capeheart models sold in excess of $5000 in the 1930s. They were certainly excellent in every way. The best? Who knows. I know, thumbing through this book I have on nearly every tube radio made, reveals some butt ugly units, from companies you've never heard of. Then you have the classics of Zenith, Philco, Atwater Kent, Scott and so on

[gadget73]

There are a lot of ways to define worst. People knock the AA5, but there are a ton of them, and they work pretty reliably, if not spectacularly. Yeah its a ho-hum nothing special radio but the fact you can find one 50 years later and make it work for a few dollars has to say something about the design.

I will definitely agree with you on those printed circuit vacuum tube sets though. Those are a mess.

[leadlike]

Most of the big makers (RCA, Zenith, GE etc) got their start by building quality radios. As a result, most of the name brand stuff you find will be pretty good. Even a lot of the 'budget sets' seem to be built up pretty nicely. That being said, I am not a fan of Philco's output. My biggest complaint has to be how they constantly changed their designs during the production of the radio. This can be extremely frustrating when you have a radio where even the tube lineup has been changed. I don't know if this was the result of their putting inadequate designs out on the market and making running changes to them as issues cropped up, or if they just were using whatever components that they could get for cheap.

[toxcrusadr]

Yeah, any of the major brands had good days and bad days. I have some old RCA, Zenith, Philco, etc. that are built like tanks. All those companies made some dogs.

Midwest, now there was a company that artificially pumped up the tube count in their radios using useless tubes. There was one where they used 6 volt tubes and lined them up in series with about 4 voltage dropping ballast tubes that did nothing but waste power. They could have used a 6V transformer. They did a lot of stuff like that. Even Midwest, though, made some great sets.

[jeyurkon]

Originally Posted by radiotvnut

GE made some pretty trashy tube radios from the mid '50's through the late '60's. Many were a pain to work on, especially the AM/FM models from the '60's and many suffered from "silver migration" in the IF transformers. The PC boards were nothing to write home about and the tube sockets were not great, either.

While I have to agree with you, I do have a GE C-403A clock radio that has never been worked on and I listen to it nearly every evening. This is a '61 model. I think I've just been lucky with this one.

John

[jeyurkon]

While I love my Arvin metal midget, 4 tube super-het, made by Noblitt-Sparks it isn't one of the best. I'm surprized my brother and I are still alive given the number of shocks we've received due to the paper caps that connect from the line to the chassis. No safety capacitors back in those days.

John

[wa2ise]

Back before Japan figured out how to do quality electronics, they made some pretty crappy AA5s.

[toxcrusadr]

Dayum, you'd have to be sitting under the transmitter for that thing to work...

[AUdubon5425]

I like and started to collect some of the late-50's Arvin and Arvin-built Silvertone AA5s. When they work they're a good set, but those PCBs are a mess - everyone I have has a poor connection associated with the pcb.

Biggest pieces of junk I've ever seen are Electrophonic stereos. I know that's solid state, but man...

[Sandy G]

The little Arvin 2, 3, & 4 tube models of the late '30s & '40s have a certain "something" about them...The 2-tube version I have will pick up the local AM daytimer, but that's about it. It "tries" hard to pick up stuff at night, though, but just can't quite do it. Don't think I'll give up the R-389 for it anytime soon...

[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.