1961 Zenith console stereo

[Adam]

I went and recapped this completely (There's nearly as many of those wax&paper caps and electrolytics in this as in most TVs from the same era - if not more because of that separate reverb amp chassis with its own power supply). Additional problems turned out to be the limiter tube with an open filament, and the RCA plug on the wire going to the output of the reverb spring unit was cracked and giving an intermittent connection. And I kept hearing static that turned out to be coming from intermittent connections at those plugs for hooking in external speakers. I have no plans to hook up extra speakers, so I left the plugs in place but just soldered the connections together permanently on the back of the jacks the plugs went in.

This console just blows away any other console I've had, even my other Zenith. And I still haven't changed the crossover capacitors yet or checked the bias on the outputs, so I'm sure it will sound even better. It'd be interesting to compare this, the absolute top-of-the-line tube Zenith, to it's transistor counterpart. My '66 Zenith transistor console does have the push-pull output, but it's not the super heavy duty amp with it's own chassis. And it doesn't have all the cool extras like the reverberator or the 'presence' control.

Extremely sensitive FM tuner, I'm picking up stations I didn't even know were there with just the built-in antenna. But it is kind of odd to have a stereo amp with a mono FM tuner.

I still haven't even tested the record changer yet. I'm looking forward to playing some records with the reverb cranked up.