Just scored this beautiful RCA CTC-121 on Facebook Marketplace for free. The gentleman bought it brand new in 1982 and has taken extraordinary care of it, and I am thrilled to give it a loving home. Model VGM2022T.

Beautiful set - I'd take that over a flat screen any day. Tabletop sets in wood cabinets just have such a premium look. I see it works. I wonder if it has ever needed service.

It's a very clean, low hour set, and I don't think the back has ever been off. The man I got it from said that it's been sitting in a closet for 25 years. I did just have a scare though. The picture would randomly get dark and erratic, but I solved that by turning the video level control a few times to break up the oxidation.

If that set has AV inputs you should pair it with a CED player. There is a stereo RCA similar to it at a local thrift. If I had room I think I'd grab it.

I don't have a CED player or any disks. I just set up the greyscale on this thing, and the colors are very good. I read on an old thread that these sets have full I Q color demodulation just like the CTC-2's did. Is that true?

See my post #10 on this thread:

http://videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=262635&highlight=i%2Fq+demodulation

To determine if your particular set has I/Q demodulation, get the schematic and look for the color IC to have an associated I delay line.

Unfortunately, you cannot find a source today that outputs true I/Q modulation (Laserdiscs may be an exception, but I am not sure); however, you will see some improvement in color detail, accompanied by some quadrature distortion, due to current sources having fairly wideband equiband modulation.

This schematic shows the single-ended delay line driver:
http://www.videokarma.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=166208&d=1265471206

It's in this thread:
http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?p=2965687

Another thing I didn't mention: if you use a baseband input (either S-video or composite) you will avoid the sound trap problems and get the full advantage of wideband chroma without the quadrature distortion caused by cutting off the upper Q sidebands. This will also give stronger I-axis color details, as you will be getting both I channel sidebands.

Some more theory:
To get full advantage of the I/Q system when going in via RF, the I channel should actually have a 6 dB boost of sideband frequencies below about 3.08 MHz (or the demodulated I baseband frequencies above 500 kHz) to make up for the missing upper sideband. Although this was discussed in some NTSC papers, I don't think it was implemented in any receivers.

Having full amplitude wideband I response also means that cross-color on composite video (the Johnny Carson plaid jacket problem) would be worse, but not on this set because it has a comb filter.

I have RCA cables coming straight from my audio/video distribution center. This set took the place of my 2004 Trinitron.