Anyone know anything about this model?

http://phoenix.craigslist.org/evl/clt/898291931.html

Looks top of the line or close to and was built before George Curtis Mathes jr died.

TIA

Brock

There's one for sale here in California San Fransisco Craigslist that pops up from time to time as well. Friggin tank man! The one out here is stated that the TV doesn't work. All 100% solid state. Nice set if you have the room.

Probably made by NEC. That's who made the chassis for most CM sets during the solid state era. I wonder if that cabinet is real wood or particleboard. IMHO, the CM sets from the late '70's and early '80's were not the best quality, given what they cost. This TV may be an exception.

My vote goes to Particleboard. Think about the amount of raw materials that wood be needed for that size cabinet! But, it could be solid wood I suppose.

In any event, the SS Curtis Mathes aren't too special.....and it wasn't long before they sold out to some other manufacturer at this point.

I think it would have an NEC chassis. We had one almost exactly like this at our shop but the CRT neck accidentally got broken so we salvaged the parts and discarded the cabinet. It is incredibly heavy dense particleboard and plastic moldings, not real wood.

I used to have a late 1950s version of this Curtis Mathis with B&W TV. It was real wood and weighed so much that it took 4 people to move it.

This is much like everything else in the world, at one time it was about the pride in a product. Now it's about the mass production and cutting costs..

Sad... Truely sad....

I used to have a late 1950s version of this Curtis Mathis with B&W TV. It was real wood and weighed so much that it took 4 people to move it.

My 1960-ish CM B&W combo is made of heavy particle board with real wood veneer over it, I'd still say it was a good quality cabinet compared to modern P-Board furniture.

The Curtis Mathes cabinets went to pot in the 70s, sadly. All the sets after that, even the big combos, had particle board frames with veneered paneling, and lots of fake carving (moulded plastic). The high-end ones from the late 50s (or whenever they got going), up to the late 60s, were very elegant, real wood cabinets. I had to cut one apart to fit it in the trash, and the top panel was a real solid wood plank; not even plywood! (That was in the early 80s, and the set was junk due to abuse by previous owner).

Charles

"The most expensive TV in America-And darn well worth it !!" Ho-Kay.....

The Curtis Mathes cabinets went to pot in the 70s, sadly. All the sets after that, even the big combos, had particle board frames with veneered paneling, and lots of fake carving (moulded plastic). The high-end ones from the late 50s (or whenever they got going), up to the late 60s, were very elegant, real wood cabinets. I had to cut one apart to fit it in the trash, and the top panel was a real solid wood plank; not even plywood! (That was in the early 80s, and the set was junk due to abuse by previous owner).

Charles

I junked a '74 CM solid state combo that was in one of those cheap particleboard and plastic cabinets. Weighed a ton! The chassis was modular and was built by NEC. The CRT was a 23" delta gun Westinghouse tube (which was toast). The record changer was some cheap plastic BSR. Nothing on this unit worked. I saved the el cheapo speakers for use in old radios and I saved the TV chassis just in case a part was needed off of it.

BTW, does anyone know when CM discontinued tube-chassis TV's? Years ago, I had a CM tube type color console in a real wood cabinet. The chassis was an RCA clone.

OK, sounds like a good one to pass on then, Thanks everyone!

Brock

I just got a 1971 CM tube type color set, so they were making them at least through then. It is an RCA CTC-25 type chassis with some upgrades...it has cooling fins on the power transformer, a 6BQ5 audio output tube, and an IC audio demodulator. It has a 25V rectangular type picture tube but the cabinet is made of particle board, masonite and plastic.

Here is a video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqsW7MwFcqI

I think Chad's is probably the newest tube set I've seen from CM... I had one of those a long time ago. Definitely an RCA clone.

Charles

Looks top of the line or close to and was built before George Curtis Mathes jr died.


I thought it was "jr" who didn't really care about the product and let the company go to hell? But I knew a lot of people who fell for that idea of CM "superiority". Zenith should have just shown a picture of a circuit board burned to a crisp by tube heat, and called it a day!

I definitely don't think that Curtis Mathes was superior in quality to any of the other small production TV companies (i.e. Packard-Bell, Hoffman, Kaye-Halbert, etc), or even department store brands. Curtis Mathes sets were perfectly good, but not of the caliber of DuMont or Zenith. They marketed as "the most expensive TV in the world", and I guess they were. The service and exclusive sales stores made you feel like you're dealing high-end, much the same as you can go to Toyota and get a Camry, or go to Lexus and get an ES300. Same car, different horn button and dealership, higher price & better service.

Charles

Hi,

Curtis-Mathes made OK TV sets in the 1960's. Their console stereos then were excellent. When Curtis Mathes, Jr. came along, what real quality they had went to heck in a handbasket. In the 1970's you had some of the department store brands with better actual quality and reliability. :tears:

This must be the last tv-radio-phono combo set ever made:
http://flint.craigslist.org/ele/1127201218.html

1985 Curtis-Mathes. It even has 8-track and cassette.

Yep, that's probably one of the last ones. I've had many similar CM models over the years.

i think they made an even bigger one.i remember a model that had a reel to reel unit built in.it was over 5 feet tall and took up almost the whole side of a room!
i hated those things then and now.we called them "andres tv".

I once had a mid to late 1950s Curtis Mathis console set with 21 inch B&W TV, reel to reel tape player, phono, and AM/FM radio. It was about 6 feet long and 4 feet high. Took 4 people to move it. Needless to say, I gave it away, just too big for me.

I also have restored a mid 1960s B&W Curtis Mathis TV. Even at that time, Curtis Mathis was using Japanese made capacitors. This TV is presently on loan to the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum-CM was based in Texas. Even though it is a console TV, it used the same chassis as one of their portable sets.

Weren't the massive, ugly 70's and 80's CM consoles "sold" mainly by rent to own stores like Rent-a-Center and Aarons? Overpriced crap that was basically paid for many times over by the time the renter was actually done with it...

Weren't the massive, ugly 70's and 80's CM consoles "sold" mainly by rent to own stores like Rent-a-Center and Aarons? Overpriced crap that was basically paid for many times over by the time the renter was actually done with it...

Yes.........Kind of how it works now, only with modern crap. Still way overpriced.

Weren't the massive, ugly 70's and 80's CM consoles "sold" mainly by rent to own stores like Rent-a-Center and Aarons? Overpriced crap that was basically paid for many times over by the time the renter was actually done with it...

I think you are correct. I've seen Curtis Mathes, Colortyme, and Rutherford TV's that looked identical except for the name. Most used an NEC chassis. Yes, they were overpriced crap, IMHO. You could have bought a Zenith, RCA, etc. and had a much better set for less money.

The way they worded those commercials suckered a lot of people to buy those damn things. "It's only 40 bucks a month"......for the rest of your life. Muahahahahahahah!

There was a Curtis Mathis showroom in Metairie, La. (a suburb of New Orleans) at least until the early-mid 90's. I remember an old boss of mine back then bragging about his new CM set, best money could buy, etc., etc., I saw it briefly once and the picture looked muddy to me.

About a year ago, I junked a '74 CM TV/stereo combo in a cheap particleboard and plastic cabinet. The chassis was built by NEC and the CRT was a 23" delta gun Westinghouse. The CRT was toast and the chassis had many problems. The stereo chassis was some low grade outfit that looked similar to a Yorx, Lloyds, Electrophonic, etc. I do remember the speakers being made in Taiwan.

The newer CM sets had a single board chassis and an inline CRT. Those didn't hold up well, either. I remember having another CM 19" set from the early '80's. It was in a metal cabinet and used standard rotary tuners. It had a good picture; but, the horizontal would sometimes fall out of sync and a good slap on the cabinet would bring it back. I resoldered everything on that chassis and still couldn't fix the problem. I ended up giving the set to a friend to stick in the laundry room so his wife could watch TV while washing clothes. That was years ago and I think he still has it.

In the mid-80s our neighbor bought a new set and gave his old one to my sisters. It was a C-M 19" from about '76-77. It had an upright modular chassis and was assembled in the British West Indies, which I found quite odd! It did seem to be a well built set, heavy. Eventually the height shrunk real bad-just a bad cap, I'm sure, but at the time I didn't know that. All of the 70s/80s consoles appeared to be low end. I recall seeing one at a friends house once, it was pretty new at the time, muddy picture and very bad "snivets".

Around 1990, give or take a year, they ran a promotion (maybe for an anniversary?) where they were looking for the oldest C-M TV. The print ad showed something from the 10BP4 era as an example. The idea was to get people to trade in their old sets (of any brand) on a new CM. I called the local store, thinking they might be swimming in great old stuff! The young manager said that any trades like that were just tossed...he really didn't want to bother with me. I bet at the time the best trade they would have gotten might have been a CTC-38 or something.

Speaking of CM and NEC, I think I read that the founder of NEC is the man who founded VIZIO. Certianly would explain the quality of the VIZIO sets. :)

BIll R

I wonder how many of those Vizio sets come back? This newleywed couple that I know just had to have a modern flatscreen TV and was asking me what brand to buy. Vizio was one of the ones I told him NOT to buy. What does he do? Goes out and buys a Vizio. Now, I'm waiting to see how long before it craps out and he comes whining to me to fix it.

I just remembered something else about NEC. We had an early '70's Truetone portable hybrid color TV that was actually built by Midland for Western Auto. I opened it one time and it was full of NEC branded tubes.

My experience with NEC sets and monitors has been mainly positive, but to make such bold statements as C-M did, while using a NEC chassis, seems ridiculous.

Seen a few NEC tv's re-badged as Sylvania or Emerson iirc, from the early to mid 80s, and a few video consoles with NEC tubes in them.

I have 2 mid to late 80's Curtis Mathes (NEC) console tv's in storage. I'll try and post pics later today or tomorrow. Don't understand why everyone pisses on CM and NEC. I have ran across multiple NEC sets that are ancient in terms of tv age, and are still working just fine. Certainly the 2 sets I have do.

The older of the sets I have did need a flyback replacemet, but WTF, an easy and cheap 30 minute fix. No big deal. I don't really know the history of this set as it came from an estate sale, but I suspect it has thousands of hours of use and still has a color picture as good as any standard crt set produced in the last 20 years or so. This set is a 2 tuner model, innovative for the mid 80's. The cabinet, while particle board and vinyl, and extremely heavy, is in as new condition.

The newer of the sets I have, I do know the history of. It was purchased new by a couple who used it until late 2008. The only reason they gave it up was that they moved into a retirement home and did some downsizing. They passed it on to their son in law, who used it for a few months, until some other family member gave him another CM console, in a blonde colored cabinet. He gave the set to me to do with what I please. It works perfectly with stunning color saturation, as good as any old ChromaColor or CCII. This set has never seen a servicemans screwdriver. The cabinet is also perfect.

The only 2 drawbacks I see to these sets is that they are generally ugly, but then again every Zenith, RCA, Maggie, Sony, Panasonic, Quasar, etc set from the same era is just as god damned ugly. And, they only have 54 channel tuners, so one is left to use a high quality VCR with a tuner, (a rare item these days) or a set top cable box or digital converter box.

As I was typing this I remembered I had another old CM set. I gave it to my brother years ago. It is still working, the tv part anyway. It was one of those early 80's vertical 19" consoles with a cheap am/fm/cassette and turntable beneath the tv. Had a badge on the mask from Colortyme if I remember correctly. I got the set form my ex in laws - again never seen a servicemans tool set. I don't think this was a NEC set though. I believe this tv was an RCA - as I used to have an early 80's 19" RCA tabletop set that had an identical control layout.

I worked on many CM SS chassis and they were very easy to work on and fix. If anyone needs one, I have a tube type CM chassis that is an RCA clone. (CTC25?) It also has the stereo receiver with a tuning eye.

wasn t there a mid 80s model that had a bar built in? i remember "sledgehammer" frank rented one of those from colortyme. it was about 5 feet tall. we had to move it to the basement rec room. i personally think he moved it so colortyme wouldn t repo it. he even narrowed the doorway so that it couldn t be taken back up. gotta love the guy!!!!