Free Curtis Mathis Color Console Combo in OHIO

[Eric H]

Originally Posted by Charlie

.

Eric, were you using it for firewood??? Or you just felt like being destructive that day???

No, it was just junk! I bought it off eBay for the CRT (that was supposed to be good but wasn't) Broken legs, beat up. The TV chassis is in the rafters of my garage

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by Adam

I got a CM brochure from 1962 today, and they had some large cabinets. I think I have seen pictures here of some of those taller entertainment centers they had, but there is one in here known as "the montgomery" (model m-3024) that is 110" long! 1100$, or 1250$ with a reel-reel tape player added.

I remember seeing one of the combo units on ebay a year or so ago that had a reel to reel deck in it. Didn't look very fancy... pretty basic looking.

[peverett]

In the TV shop that I cleaned out, there was a middle to late 1950s Curtis Mathis B&W console. This console contained a 21" square tube B&W TV, phonograph, AM/FM radio, and reel to reel tape player. It was blonde, about 4 feet high by 6 feet long and made of real wood. It was so heavy it took 4 of us to lift it, even heaver than my CTC 9 color console TV.

As it was so heavy, I gave it to a person from Dallas, Texas who picked it up in an early 1960s Ford pickup with camper.

[Adam]

Check out the size of this CM console!

[andy]

Color convertible?

[Adam]

Nowhere does it explain more, on another page it just says "COLOR CONVERTIBLE - These models have been designed to be easily converted to color television"

[blue_lateral]

I think Curtis Mathes designed some sets so the color chassis and tube would just bolt in later. I read somewhere that in practice it turned out to be a huge fiasco.

John

[Adam]

Here's the rest of it. It says some stuff about their B&W chassis, but nothing about the color. I left some of the models which were just hi-fi's out.

[Richard D]

The console on the bottom left under the price says, With qualified trade. They list prices with bigger B/W screens or with Reel 2 reel but none of them say how much the color version costs. I wonder why?

[peverett]

The one we gave away was the La Havre in blonde.

[peverett]

I still have a couple of the "Westchesters" if anyone is interested. The TV shop that I cleaned out was in Athen's, Texas. This was the location of one of the Curtis Mathis factories-hence there were quite a few of these in the shop.

The abandoned building was still there a couple of years ago.

[Charlie]

It appears that the CM I have is in photo number 9... The Williamsburg.

[Jeffhs]

I have a Zenith C-845 AM/FM radio, 1960 vintage. It has a very nice oak finish cabinet, but the front panel is plastic. The Z crest in the center of the cabinet, as well as the ring around the speaker opening, however, appear to be metal. This seems to me to be an interesting combination of wood, plastic and metal used in a radio which was one of Zenith's best table models of the 1960s. It was only a matter of time, I guess, before the company's TVs went the same route. Zenith color console TVs of 1970s vintage had real wood cabinets, all right, but the accent pieces over the speaker grilles, etc. were brown plastic. It was only a short step from there to all-plastic cabinets, or cabinets made of such thin metal it isn't funny. I don't much care for wood-grain metal cabinets, either. If I'm going to get a TV in a wood cabinet, I want it to be all wood, not this fake stuff. I have my video entertainment center (TV, VCR, DVD, cable box) installed in a genuine solid oak utility cart made by Sauder; I would not trade it for any of this plastic stuff coming off the lines these days.

Zenith and other manufacturers' console black-and-white TVs of the '50s until at least the early '60s also had genuine solid wood cabinets; in the late '60s until 1972 I had a 23" Zenith b&w console, 1963 vintage, which was in a beautiful dark wood cabinet (not sure if it was walnut, mahogany, or...?). My folks' first TV was a 1954 RCA Victor 21" b&w console in a dark wood cabinet as well; again, I'm not sure what type of wood it was, but, like my Zenith (which met its demise when I moved in 1972--boy, I hated to part with it and wish I could have kept that nice cabinet), it was real solid wood, none of this particle-board stuff we see today. I think TV manufacturers were starting to cut corners by the mid-'60s, however, as my folks' second TV, a Crosley Super V 21" b&w console, was in a blond wood cabinet; I swear, the wood in it wasn't nearly as solid as the RCA or my Zenith. When my mother wanted a new TV in 1965, my dad bought a Sears Silvertone 17" b&w all channel portable in, yup, you guessed it, an all-plastic cabinet. Every TV I ever owned, except a 1964-vintage Silvertone color set in a metal cabinet (and a later-vintage Sears Silvertone with a smaller CRT, also in a metal cabinet) that weighed the proverbial ton (blame it on that 21" round CRT), was in a plastic cabinet, including the two color sets I have today, my RCA CTC185 and Zenith Sentry 2. The new plasma/LCD sets are worse. The "cabinets" of these TVs are so fragile that one hard bump will crack the plastic, it is far too easy to knock the set off a table (some recent Philips-"Magnavox" CRT televisions are like that as well--just the act of pressing a button on the front panel will push the set off its stand; best to operate these sets with the remote, IMHO), and of course the plasma or LCD panels are fragile as all get out as well. I see plasma/LCD TVs on ebay every now and again with broken screens and other broken parts rendering them unusable; the sad part is the sets are only, in many cases, only a year or two old.

I know we're living in a throwaway age, but this, IMHO, is too much. What's worse is the way most plasma/LCD TVs are made, with the video driver chips for the panel molded right into the ribbon cable between the TV chassis and the display. I read in one of these forums here at AK where if one of those driver ICs goes bad, the entire panel must be replaced, as the cable is hard-wired to the panel at one end and to the chassis at the other. Whatever happened to the days when TV sets were built to last? These days, even LCD or plasma sets will wind up in the trash after a few years. I have a friend whose parents had a 25" Zenith System III color console; it lasted them 15 years. When that set finally bit the dust in the early '90s, they bought a 25" RCA (Thomson) set with Guide Plus, stereo sound, remote....the whole nine yards. Two years later the CRT burned out. They pitched that set and bought yet another RCA/Thomson 25-incher. That did it. That set still works to this day, about five years later, more or less. It's in a plastic cabinet, of course, as was their first RCA/Thomson set. My own 19" RCA/Thomson CTC185 is in a plastic cabinet as well, and still works like a charm six years after I purchased it, with only two minor repairs.

Zenith (the last vestiges of the company before LG took over and wrecked their fine 82-year reputation for quality, for good) had two color consoles in the '90s in wood cabinets, although I suspect these so-called "wood" cabinets were actually particle board with wood grain pasted over it. Zenith also used this dodge in the 1930s to make "wood-grain" cabinets for its table radios of the period, including the famous "Walton" model; the technique was known as photo-finish, in which walnut or some other fine grade of wood was photographed and printed on heavy paper which was then glued over the particle board. However, in those days they had an excuse for cutting corners: the country was in the middle of the Depression in the '30s. American TV manufacturers' excuse today for using more and more plastic, rather than wood, in radio and TV cabinets, among other things, is that most everything is made offshore these days, as cheaply as possible. You cannot hope to sell a TV set, for example, for the prices a lot of the offshore makes are selling for these days unless the set is made using every cost- and corner-cutting technique known to man, including putting the thing in a plastic cabinet that cracks if you put the least bit of pressure on it, not to mention circuitry that goes West in a very short time. No wonder we are already seeing RCA/Thomson Guide-Plus (not to mention Philips, et al.) TVs, some not more than a couple years old, on treelawns and curbs these days. Before long we'll probably be seeing plasmas or LCDs being pitched because of broken screens, bad driver chips, or even broken control-panel buttons; I've seen perfectly good sets in the trash simply because the cord was frayed or the remote quit. I once rescued a 1969 Zenith SC300 19" portable that had been thrown out simply because the remote hand unit got lost; the TV itself worked perfectly after I got it home. There is also the case where people throw out perfectly good TVs, radios, stereos and other furniture and buy new, cheap plastic stuff simply because the styling of the old things is out of date, but that's material for another thread.

[truetone36]

The "Westchester' is the consolette on legs, isn't it? That sounds interesting. BTW I was in Athens, TX most of last summer. I only managed to find 2 really rough Admiral tabletop b/w sets, though.


Dumont-First with the finest in television.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by peverett

I have metal case ,table top, color TVs from the early 1970s from both Curtis Mathis and Zenith. The difference in the quality of the electronics is amazing. Zenith has the hand-wired chassis made like a tank.

That's exactly why I've liked Zenith radios and TVs as long as I have (that's most of my life, since I was eight years old when I first became interested in electronics). Don't know exactly why I like Zenith so well, though. I've had Zenith TVs that lasted years, including a 1978 Zenith solid-state 12-inch portable that lasted 22 years and was still going strong when I got rid of it (moved to an apartment in 1999, had no room for it and my other two color sets, one of which is a 1995 Zenith Sentry 2 that still works and makes a great picture with its original CRT).

I have six Zenith radios as well which are built very solidly and work very well, including two 1980-vintage radios with circuit boards. The '80s-vintage sets (Zenith R-70 AM/FM transistor portable and H480W AM/FM/FM-stereo clock radio) were not cheap, and they showed it: the construction was solid, the sound quality is excellent. My tube-type Zeniths are the same way. Metal chassis, conservatively-designed circuitry, all the hallmarks of Zenith before they sold out to offshore interests in the late '80s. You can be sure I will keep every one of these radios, as they represent an era and a level of quality the likes of which, like the Zenith Radio Corporation itself, we will never see again.

I knew someone in my hometown whose family had a Curtis Mathes three-way color console. They liked it, as nearly as I could tell, but I'm guessing they must have gotten rid of it some time in the '70s or thereabouts. This was the only CM console I ever saw before joining AK, but from what I've seen and read here about them they must have been great sets in their day.

The television chassis in the CMs may well have been clones of the RCA CTC-15 chassis, as most 1960s color TVs, except Zenith, used some variation of one RCA color chassis or another. I looked at the front panel of the CM shown in another post (the one where it was mentioned the neck had been broken off the CRT) and must agree. I once had a Sears-Silvertone roundie in a heavy metal cabinet, CTC12 clone I'm guessing, that weighed the proverbial ton (no legs, though, although there were threaded holes in the bottom of the cabinet so consolette legs may well have been an optional accessory). It was given to me by a neighbor of mine in my hometown who had had it in his garage, probably for years or perhaps a decade or so, but it worked fairly well when I got it home. The set met its demise some three years later, however, when the video output tube socket broke out of the video PC board. It was a good set while it lasted, although towards the end it developed color-sync problems and hum bars that floated up through the picture. I didn't try to repair it since I knew the set was on its last legs, but I did not expect it to go the way it did. Those early PC boards must have been as fragile as glass.