Sony ICF-9650W hi-fi table radio
 

My cousin had me come to his house to show him how to use his DVD player for the 13th time and before I got ready to leave, he informed me that he had a radio to give me. He said someone at work was going to toss it and he grabbed it for me.

It is a Sony ICF-9650W "fidelity sound" AM/FM table radio from the late '70's. It has controls for bass and treble as well as a lighted dial. The speaker is branded "Pioneer" and is a heavy 6" air suspension type. Normally, I don't give solid state table radios of this vintage a second look; but, this one was free and it seems to be a higher end model as far as late '70's consumer table radios go.

My camera is unavailable at the moment; but, here's a link to a photo of the same radio.

http://www.radioatticarchives.com/radio.htm?radio=4273

When I got the radio home, I discovered that the controls were extremely dirty. Now, after a proper cleaning, the AM band plays great; but, the FM band has a strange problem in that the audio rapidly "skips" or "fades in and out at rapid intervals" The problem is less noticable when tuned to a weak station. First, I'll change the electrolytic caps and see if that makes a difference. If that doesn't work, I'll have to find a diagram and start checking voltages, etc.

The only real thing that I don't like about this radio is there's no way to switch off the AFC. As most know, this makes reception of distant stations difficult. I have a similar late '60's solid state Zenith that does have the ability to switch off the AFC and it makes picking up distant stations much easier.

Those same radios were used as shipboard crew entertainment radios by the US Navy. The FM reception is outstanding!

They weren't popular, because they were installed in crew's lounges, and with day and night sleepers, no one had a chance to really use them. I got one for my office on the carrier Roosevelt from an unoccupied Airwing berthing area. When the Navy got rid of them, eBay was flooded with them - and they all had a big flat steel plate on the side or bottom for shipboard mounting. They still occasionally come up for bid.

Cheers,

The AM performance of this thing is decent as well. I was listening to 650 WSM and if it wasn't for the light background noise, I would have almost thought I was listening to FM. While listening to WSM tonight, I heard something that's rare on radio these days. The DJ played a Conway Twitty song that was an LP cut. When the song was over, he wanted to re-play a portion of the song. He said something along the line of: So, I'm going to go over here to the turntable, lift the tonearm, and place the tonearm in the approximate right position. I suspect that WSM is one of the few big time stations, if not the only big time station, that still plays records over the air.

I pulled the Sam's Photofact on this radio and noticed something interesting. The Canadian version of this radio had a record out jack while the US version did not. I wonder why they didn't put such a jack on all versions? It would be simple enough to add a record out jack on my model and I may just do it. Who knows, I might want to record some aircheck tapes of some of the last big remaining music stations on AM such as WSM, WMC, KWKH, WDIA, and the "Route 66" show on KMOX.

This is only a guess, but many FM demod circuits (ratio detectors mainly) have a small electrolytic cap in them. Around 10uF at 25V, and caps like this and of that vintage dry out and lose capacitance. Try replacing it, and it shouldn't require realignment of the detector circuit. I don't think the value is all that citical.

That's not a bad set - a friend of mine inherited one of these a few years ago and I was impressed by it.

I know someone (my barber in my hometown) who has a radio like that in his shop. Not exactly like yours, but very close to it. He would use it more than he does, he tells me, but a wire came loose on the speaker some years ago, and he never had it repaired. Too bad, because I think his set has about the same circuitry as yours and works just as well, just a different front-panel layout and knobs.

I have a Zenith C845 (the radio in my avatar) that has switchable AFC. It will bring in, using just its built-in antenna, a classical music station 50+ miles from here that is right next to a very strong country station--the classical station is at 104.9 and the country-western station is 0.2 MHz down the dial, at 104.7. I can also hear stations from Akron, Ohio, some 60 miles southwest of here, almost as clearly as if they were local, and of course it receives all Cleveland FMs (about 30 or so, counting those stations in suburbs and outlying areas) quite well. However, with two IF stages and an RF stage, both used on AM as well as FM, I'm not surprised this radio works as well as it does. These older radios were built and sold during a time when FM stations were few and far between, so they had to be built for DX. Many of these radios also had a phonograph input jack on the rear apron of the chassis for use with a turntable with a high-output cartridge, but I wouldn't use that input for anything unless I was sure, beyond the shadow of even the most unreasonable doubt, that the blocking capacitor in series with that jack was good; these are almost always defective in radios of this vintage.

Not at all a bad radio. I too have one--that also was a garbage find for someone else--and I got it from them for a couple of bucks, maybe 10 years ago.

I like the design. Notice that big sink on the amp chip. Nice big speaker too--and for a table radio--pretty big power tranny.

Still though...it will NOT get CLOSE to my Sylvaina table radios, model RM-90 and RM-3000, that I have spoken about in the past.(There is also an FM-only version, which I also have).They have sealed--suspension speakers, discrete ckty, with P-P TO-3 germanium amps, and at LEAST 5 true watts of power. Also--switchable AFC, bass and treble controls, and several IF and RF stages. I think 14 or so transistors total, for an AM-FM table radio, a metal chassis, and a considerably larger tranny. But one must remember they are a product of the late 60's,( 67 or 68)--and the Sony is probably 10 years newer--and shows it, by the build of it. An old advertisement of the smaller one, RM-90, described it as a "true HI-FI radio", that had better sound that one twice it's size"--at about $100, in 1968

I have this one in my kitchen, nice radio, good reception. I noticed that even after cleaning the pots they would go noisy pretty quickly. I think I ended up replacing an electrolytic in series with the volume pot and that cured that problem.

Probably just a cost reduction -- perhaps they felt that the record out feature was more important to Canadian consumers than American ones, for whatever reason.

The Realistic DX-440 shortwave portable is another example of this: there's a plastic filler plug covering the hole in the cabinet where there would be a DIN record out jack, if it were the authentic Sangean ATS-803A. But here's it's a simple task to remove the plug and solder a PC-mounted DIN socket, as the provisions for it on the board are still there. From here you'd just need a suitable DIN cable appropriately terminated at the other end for your recording input.

My $20 KLH 21 that I just repaired pulls in stations and sounds much better than my daily driver Zenith C845. But I am still a big fan of that Zenith AM/FM series of radios.