Admiral Roundie

[azbigsam]

Looked online for a set like this and couldn't find much. Owner has offered to sell it for $350. He is a TV repairman by trade. He said he put a NOS picture tube in about 15 years ago and fires it up every 6 months. Does anyone know what year this would have been from? I wasn't able to get behind it to get a model number. Does the asking price seem reasonable considering it is working?

[sampson159]

it is worth whatever someone would pay.admiral roundie is more rare than rca from that era.350.00 might be steep but a good crt could command that alone.hope you can get this for less but either way its a nice find.good luck and keep us informed!

[bgadow]

I'm going to say it uses a CTC-11 clone chassis, so about '61 or so? Nice cabinet, most of the Admirals I've seen were lower end. $350 is top dollar for that set but, like sampson159 said, if the crt is good, well, they aren't going to get any cheaper. Just keep in mind that sets like this still get given away for free.

[hi_volt]

Cool looking set. I agree with bgadow, it looks like it could be a CTC11 clone. Is that the one you showed me the photo of?

[zenithfan1]

I wish there was a picture of the back of the set. It could be a little older than that judging by the CRT bezel, possibly a 9 or 10 clone as they had control layouts like this too. I would pick it up if it were me, those rarely if ever show up anymore and that one could look really nice all fixed up. Has he said the price is firm? Go there with $300 cash and offer $250, if he won't take that, say $300 is all I have and you'll likely go home with the set. Either way, like others have said, a strong CRT alone is worth close to that so you really can't go wrong. If you have a CRT tester, bring that too Good luck, I hope you get it. I haven't seen one of these in person in almost 20 years....

[Steve D.]

Just the general look of the cabinet, IMO, grill cloth & design/appearance of the knobs, I would call this Admiral an early 60's era set. RCA CTC-10 or 11 chassis. If you have the space, go for it.

-Steve D.

[Charlie]

Looks like it would have been an expensive set. I'd go for it... especially nice that the guy has changed the tube and fires it up once in a while.

[oldtvman]

Based on the fact that most manufacturers didn't re-enter the color market until 61-62 this could have been old stock from Rca that Admirial used to help re-enter the color market. I think Walt Disney may have had a helping hand in accelerating the color tv. I talked to a dealer that was in the business in the early 60's and he said after Disney came on they had a hard time keeping of with the new demand for color.

[oldtvman]

BTW my guess the chassis is either 9 or 10 also based on the plastic frame around the crt.

[Sandy G]

Well, $350 MIGHT be a little on the high side, but...Like the old saying-"A Bird in the Hand is worth 2 in the Bush..." Sometimes, you just gotta strike when the iron's hot...You may not come up on another Admiral color roundie again for another 10 years...Or maybe EVER...

[bgadow]

It looks like a faceplate tube, I don't see a seperate glass? I think they were introduced by RCA as an option with the CTC-11.

One of the repairmen I know started out working for the local Admiral dealer about that time. His boss put a color set in the front window on a timer so that it would come on when Bonanza aired. People would come by and watch it in the parking lot.

[Jeffhs]

I bet you'd have to be independently wealthy to own any of the RCA TVs on Steve's site, when those sets were new. I'm guessing the early RCA color sets, CTC4, 5, 6, etc. went for $500+ in the early '50s, which would be well over $1k in today's dollars. It probably wasn't until the late '60s-'70s that color TV really took off in the US, and even then most folks were still watching b&w until some years later. (The lack of color programming in the '50s-'60s didn't help matters much, either.) The same thing happened with flat screens; when the first ones came on the market, they went for $1k or more, even for smaller screen sizes. (Bear in mind, this was long before ATSC->NTSC converter boxes were available to allow the use of older NTSC analog TVs with the then-new DTV signals.) Flat-screen TVs didn't drop in price significantly until the DTV transition forced people to buy new TVs when the old CRT set developed expensive repair problems, like a bad CRT or flyback -- or even worse.

NBC was the first so-called "full color" television network, beginning 100-percent colorcasting in the mid-'60s. This boosted the sales of RCA color sets, since RCA owned NBC at the time.

BTW: IMO, the reason NBC has gone downhill in recent months, overtaken by CBS which is now "America's #1 most-watched network", is probably, even likely, due to the fact that a nationally-known cable television service provider, Comcast, bought NBC from GE last year; however, I think NBC was in trouble from the beginning (or just shortly after) when it sold out to GE, so the Comcast deal just made things 1,000+ times worse for the so-called "Peacock" network when it was finalized last year.

Please don't get me started on those decade-plus old shows still running on NBC (Smash, The Voice, The Biggest Loser, et al). I don't see how, in this age of TV shows that normally do not last more than one season (or two, if the network is extremely fortunate and still gets decent ratings for these programs year in and year out), such programs have lasted so long. I do not watch any of the shows I mentioned, so their futures on NBC really do not concern me (they could all be canceled tomorrow and it wouldn't bother me a bit), although I do wonder why they are still on the air after ten-plus years. Perhaps NBC, after all these years and decades, is finally running out of ideas for original programming, or perhaps cable, direct-to-viewer content over the Internet (YouTube in particular), DVDs, DVRs, video-streaming boxes by Roku, Boxee, et al. are cutting into the network's ratings? I don't think NBC-TV will ever go out of business, but the new ways people have nowadays of getting TV programming may well mean the end of the network's glory days is near, or perhaps it has arrived already.

[dtvmcdonald]

A few comments.

People who wanted color TV in the late 50s and early 6os simply got it. I went off
to college in 1962. Our dorm had a TV room with no TV. So I and a friend convinced
the powers-that-be to fork over for a 25 inch Heathkit TV, which we
built and kept running perfectly. When I was a junior my suitemate worked for
a TV repair shop. He was able to get a barely working older RCA set (roundie of
some sort) for a song, and we got it working like a champ. When I went to
grad school I got paid enough to buy a 19 inch Heathkit, the one with the special
fine-pitch tube. When the tube died (heater-cathode short) I had a terrible
time finding one in Boston ... but eventually found one in Cambridge within
hand-carry distance (two people) of our house.

About OTA digital TV: there never was any problem getting converter boxes. They
were there from the beginning. All boxes were capable of outputting NTSC,
but as far as I know the early ones didn't output modulated RF. I tried
a cheap modulator and it worked fine. The early boxes did have utter crap
equalizer circuits and so could not handle anything worse than a -6dB
post-echo ghost and couldn't handle anything worse than a -20 dB pre-echo.
Modern ones will do a single 0 dB echo, but take a large signal to do so.
The standard European system was specifically designed to do 0 dB ghosts,
but it requires either reduced bitrate or even more (lots more) transmitter
power line power than ATSC to do so (or some combination ... there is a huge tradeoff table in the standard.)

Doug McDonald

[Bill R]

I still wonder how CBS became the most watched network. I have seen the programs and am not impressed. I am not impressed with any major network programming.

[Big Dave]

If the networks had to depend on me for revenue, they would all be out of business. I do watch some network TV, but very little.

I can think of a few reasons NBC is in the basement (except news). 1) Loss of rights to the AFC Sunday package to CBS and the loss of the NBA to ABC/ESPN on ABC. 2. Jay Leno 3. The director of programming that approved Leno in prime time.

With the crapola the networks lay on us, it makes more grateful that the DVD was invented.