|
I worked at a Zenith dealer in the early 80's that had been a Motorola/Quasar dealer earlier. I saw a lot of old quasars come in for service. The first ones after the Matsushita takeover were pretty much the same. Then there were some ones that looked like a cross between a Matsushita and Quasar, they still had a similar drawer, but had different modules. Then some completely Matsushita things came along in the late 70's. Thats when this particular shop switched to Zenith I think.
There were three kinds of Motorola Quasar AFAIK. THe first ones had a wide drawer and were all solid state (in the mid 60's!). After that came a narrower drawer with about the same electronics in it. Along with that came the "Quasar II", a low priced set with 4 tubes in it. It was built in the same kind of drawer as the newer solid state set. I should mention that all there sets had a power supply chassis in back that was not part of the drawer. The Quasar II had a damper and HO tube back on the power supply chassis. There was also a module in the drawer with 2 sync tubes on it. There were 19" table model versions of all of these with no drawer, too.
All the boards were removable, and you could fix most problems by unplugging the modules and plugging them back in. The solid state ones would blow up the horizontal output module a lot. The Quasar II would just pop HO tubes. They would break the glass! This seemed to happen more when the set got older. It would be really expensive now. Nevertheless, IMHO the Quasar II was more reliable that the more expensive solid state set.
I owned a Quasar II myself for a while, and it had the most bizarre failure I have ever seen. A carbon resistor shorted. Anyone ever seen that? Anyway it put some fairly high voltage (400v?) from the tube circuitry on the 21.5v regulated b+ line. The solid state parts didn't like that too much. I actually fixed it (with a big bag of transistors from Radio Shack), but it didnt have any chroma after that because it blew up a couple of IC's. Later on I found it a chroma module.
Those sets matrixed the signal back to RGB and fed it to the CRT grids, rather than mixing chroma and luminance in the CRT like most old sets did. I never saw one with a picture I would consider outstanding.
Charles- Yes, those modules you mention are the Motorola ones.
John
|