I just love looking at your post. Your work is amazing.

Thanks for the kind comment!

Here's a set that's just plain bizarre and probably really ugly to most people. Its this Philco portable with a molded plastic case made to look like alligator skin... or snake skin or whatever. The chassis is the same as used on the more common "roll-top desk" wooden model. I don't exactly love working on these: The speaker is nested inside the electrical innards and so you MUST make sure that all of the new parts you stick in avoids the back of the speaker frame. Despite all that this- along with many portables- are very excellent performers with a lot of sensitivity. The 3-gand tuning condenser alludes to that. Anyway, a recap, cleaning and she's good to go. Maybe someone will take pity on it...

+1 to Bruce47's comment.

And here's what will be occupying the bench off and on for a few weeks inbetween the hordes of little AA5's... Here is a sneak peek. Anyone want to guess what it is?

Yep, A T.O.T.L Magnavox console.

Uhhh . . . Stewart Warner console?

I see an Electro-Voice made tweeter.

the 649 in the lower number is their EIA code.

-Steve

P.S. I too enjoy your work and seeing what you restore for the club and yourself.
Although, my main interest is big heavy behemoths, I do appreciate smaller radios.

Nope, Most definitely a Magnavox 185 / 187 series three channel amp. i have that amp here. the additional amp on the right of the main amp is to drive the external speaker. both of those amps are prized by the tube amp crowd

Its a Magnavox concert grand. I'll dig into it tomorrow at the museum as its way too big to take home and unload. Its a mono unit with 2 huge speakers that appear to be 15" or so. The amp alone has something like 8 output tubes and 2 rectifiers. Two tweeters, a reel to reel, AM/FM and record player. This will be the sound system either upstairs in the big hall or downstairs. Can't wait to start on it.

Its also got a really unusual cabinet. I forget to take a pic of the front but its black lacquer with gold accents, kind of like an Asian theme.

649736

36th week of 1957

Greg.

Actually, it is a stereo unit. apparently, you did not get the companion speaker that went with it.
the purpose of that smaller amp was to drive the bass drivers on the companion speaker. the midrange & high frequency drivers were driven by one of the 6V6s on the main amp.

that amp used four of the 6V6's in parallel P.P for the bass drivers in the main cabinet. the other two 6V6's were single-ended to drive both left & right mid & High frequency drivers. that main amp has the crossover network built into the amp.

Nice. Cannot wait to see pictures.

I think we actually have a companion speaker for one of these?m, Donated years ago. It's got a different finish (mahagony) but maybe we can paint it black to match. I'll look for it today

So here's something different. Its a 1957 or 58 Magnavox concert grand in an unusual black lacquer and gold accents cabinet. I figured I was a bit tired of all of the little AA5's so this would be my project at the museum. Its too big to load up and take home to work on so I just did it there. I imagined it would take several Saturdays to get it done but instead it was done in about 4-5 hours.

Inside is a large amp with 8 6V6 output tubes and two rectifiers and two 12AX7's. Perhaps others will not agree but I feel that over the years Magnavox was all about bumping their tube counts for appearances but more on that later. There's also a tuner chassis and a separate smaller amp for external speakers. Its a mono unit as there's only a single RCA input on the amp. There are two large 15" woofers, one which I guess is more or a midrange and the other the bass driver as it has a huge magnet. There are also two horn tweeters.



The large amp was easy. Not exactly much going on inside and someone had replaced most of the caps with orange drops in the past.



Not much to the little amp either. Just a few electrolytics and some random bumblebees.



The tuner chassis is nothing horribly amazing. Its akin to what you would find in any number of other period consoles. Its good that most of the caps in the RF circuits were ceramic disc meaning that especially for FM there won't be weird alignment issues after a recap.



The recap of it all was about a 2 hour process. And so everything was all plugged back together and when fired up... no sound. Not even static. Uh oh... And so out came the amp chassis. All the iron was good. So too were all the tubes. Hooking up a speaker to the amp's external connection worked too. But when stuck back in the cabinet? Nothing. Me and another member did everything and still could not find what the issue was.

Turns out that there are 2 sets of speaker controls: one next to the record player, the other as part of the tape player. Unless BOTH sets of switches are set to "Internal" speakers the sound is cut off and since I wasn't even aware the switches existed it was only in finding them by accident that the problem was solved. It took longer to find that out than it did to overhaul the other stuff.

So how does it sound? With the massive speakers I assumed it would rattle the windows. I would say that it sounds excellent. That said, this has the SAME issue I've experienced with other Magnavoxes: The sound quality is not at the true potential that something like this should have. The bass should be IMHO about 20% more responsive. The tweeters are just ok. Yes, it is indeed impressive but my late 50's Motorola 3-way amp that uses a fraction of the output tubes sounds just as good and maybe even better.

This will be used as a permanent display item. As we will never use them the record and tape player will stay as-is. I will install a bluetooth adapter than we will occasionally use it as the sound system in some part of the building.

Wow, really cool and good job.

Eight 6V6's! Crazy.

What they should have done was build an enclosure around the amp and blow the warm air out the front. So in addition to being a sound system it could've come with a heater to warm its listeners.

Here's a few more from Sunday and Monday.

1: Metz small-ish stereo console. Metz was sort of on the cheaper end of things for German sets and it shows. The quality of the cabinetry and electronics, while decent, aren't as good as the same from Grundig, Telefunken or Saba. That said this one actually sounds rather good and is really and truly stereo and not claiming to be stereo only if you and buy some kind of adapter for FM. This one wasn't as bad because its a later model and most of the caps were polystyrene. The record player needs a new cartridge though...




2: super common GE clock radio. This one was sitting in the trash pile and missing its knobs and tubes. So I took pity on it. Recapped, replacement knobs and custom paint.

Bob,

I know it's just a common run-of-the-mill GE radio, but I'm glad you saved it. It looks great! Someone out there will be thrilled to have it.

Tom

It is amazing what a paint job and cleaning will do to even a cheapo!

Also great work on the Magnavox!

-Steve