1965 Aiwa AR-145 12 Transistor Radio Issues

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by vortalexfan

Hello everyone, this past Saturday I picked up from a local antique mall a 1965 Aiwa Model AR-145 12 Transistor AM/FM Radio that can run off of either 4 "C" batteries or AC Current.

Anyways this radio has very weak audio output (the volume has to be turned up almost full blast to be able to hear anything) and the tuner sensitivity/selectivity while its really good is really distorted even when the station is tuned in dead center, I figure its probably bad caps, but the problem is that the caps are hard to get to and unsolder from the circuit board, as I had already replaced the main filter cap which was a 500 MFD 6WVDC electrolytic and I had a heck of a time getting that cap unsoldered from the circuit board because they put too much solder on that cap and melted the (+) lead onto the board.

Anyways I would love to know a little more about this radio including if there's any service information for it out there and what kind of quality this radio would of been compared to say a similar model Zenith or Sony or RCA radio from the time period.

Thanks for your help.

This is the only AM-FM portable radio I have ever seen with the AM band extending down to 525 kHz. The standard AM broadcast band in North America begins at 550 kHz and ends at 1600 kHz. I don't know why this particular Aiwa radio goes down to 525 kHz on AM, unless the AM broadcast band actually starts there in Japan.

Your radio's weak audio may be caused by something as simple as weak batteries. Have you tried new ones? This is the very first thing I would check if I had a radio exhibiting very weak sound.

I wouldn't be too quick to suspect the capacitors until I changed the batteries. I am not by any means saying or implying the caps are not going bad (or have already, since the radio was made in 1965, 56 years ago), not having seen your set, but the batteries would be, again, the first things I would suspect in a radio with weak or no audio.

BTW, I have several Zenith AM and AM/FM radios that work and sound great for their ages. Zenith was one of the best, if not the best, manufacturers of radios (later televisions, of course) from their earliest sets until the last ones, the latter having been made just before the company was taken over by Gold Star. I hated to see that happen, as Zenith has always been my favorite brand of radio, stereo and television (I had several Zenith TVs years ago and truly hated to see the company leave Chicago). Zenith's radios, TVs and other products represented a level of quality we will, unfortunately, never see again.

To all of you who may still own one or more radios or TVs made by Zenith, I would say hold on to them as long as you can. The day Zenith left Chicago for Korea was truly the end of an era.