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Wiper has been researching the Danish consumer electronics company Bang & Olufsen for his upcoming book, The Art of Impossible: The Bang & Olufsen Story. He was granted unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to B&O, where he learned about the company’s design philosophy, process and history. Here’s a short excerpt from the article:
“In the mid-1950s, design greats like Arne Jacobsen began experimenting with new materials and colors, galvanizing a wave of mid-century modern Danish furniture makers. Everything was sleek, teak, and handsome—it still is—but exhibits showing off the new pieces had a curatorial problem: no one was making modern radio cabinets, forcing curators to display decidedly outdated designs alongside the stylish new furniture. The technology definitely needed a major overhaul.
Bang & Olufsen joined a handful of radio manufacturers in rising to the challenge. The two men spent a few years doing research and working with architects and designers to design devices as beautiful as they were functional—an approach widely taken for granted today but novel at the time[..]”
Lovely! While I could never pay $485.00 AUD for a non-working radio, I can certainly appreciate this gorgeous and unique design with radiating speaker grill louvres.
Check out this beautiful “meteor” dial:
What a stunning radio!
Here are a few more pics I snatched from the eBay listing:
Thanks for sharing, Monti!
Any lucky SWLing Post readers in Australia or New Zealand own one of these Mullards?
Many thanks to SWLing Post reader, Phil Ireland, who comments:
I’ve just received my Degen DE27 from China. Interesting little radio, I haven’t had a good chance to put it through its paces yet but my initial impressions are the radio seems well built and fairly intuitive to turn it on.
However, all the instructions are in Chinese so luckily there was someone in my office who could set the language to english otherwise, setting up the radio is a nightmare! I will have to take the radio outside to test its performance as the office environment is useless to listen in.
The box says the radio tunes from 3.2 mhz to 21.850 mhz however, I havent been able to work out how to make it tune out of the standard SW Broadcast Bands yet. Toggling between 10 khz and 9 khz steps for AM is easy as it setting the FM band coverage but I’m yet to determine the SW settings. It appears tuning is only in 5 khz as well on SW.
As for venturing into MP3 settings and recording, I’ll leave that, it seems too much of a challenge! The clock and calendar, sleep timer, alarms are all fairly straight forward but there is an “E-Book” setting which defies description! It has a USB flash disc function and inputs for a micro SD card. Charging the supplied Lithium battery is via a supplied USB cable.
The display is easy to read and attractive with excellent backlighting. I’m not expecting stellar performance on any band, after all, it was a cheap radio (about 40 AUD with free postage) but it is built around DSP architecture. Only a single bandwidth is available and there is no SSB capabilities. The radio hopefully will be ideal to throw onto a backpack or pocket as a travel portable.
If DEGEN read these comments, perhaps an English manual put online would be extremely helpful to allow users to get the most out of the DE27.
I’ll comment more on the performance later but for now, the radio shows promise.
Thanks so much for sharing your initial impressions, Phil! Please keep us informed as you discover more about this little radio!
This reminds me that I have yet to put my Degen DE221 through the paces. Stay tuned!
Sometimes when browsing eBay you’ll come across a hot item that wasn’t even on your wish list or Followed eBay Searches. This was the case for me early last month when I spotted a new listing for a Zenith Royal D7000Y-2 Trans-Oceanic that’s arguably the best performing T-O ever made. It’s not the most collectable (the final R7000 series has that distinction), but is the final model with the desirable band spread tuning arrangement. The D7000Y is also the last of the hand-wired Trans-Oceanics. Some claim this model has the best audio of the transistorized T-Os, too.
I have a soft spot in my heart for Zenith Trans-Oceanics, as the co-author of the “Royalty of Radios” reference book, the late Prof. John Bryant, was my best friend for many years. John also wrote books on Zenith’s corporate history and other models of Zenith radios. The transistorized Zenith Trans-Oceanics were unobtainable dream receivers for me when I was a teenager in the mid-1970s.
I watched this Buy-It-Now auction for three days and was very surprised it remained available, especially after noticing its superior condition compared to other auctions for the same model. Finally on the third day I pulled the trigger–I’m not a collector of vintage radios but I couldn’t miss the chance to let this fine old Zenith follow me home. At a Buy-It-Now price of $219 including cross-country shipping, it seemed like a no-brainer decision.
When the radio arrived–packed extremely well–it was in ever better condition than pictured and described (I’d call it 9.8 on a 10 scale). The package included the original hang tag, QA stickers, owners manual, service manual, marketing literature and even the original monaural earphone and AC power cord. All dial lamps and the chart light worked fine. The previous owner said the T-O was fully aligned a year ago, and indeed I found that the reception quality on the built-in whip antenna is great. I’d love to know where this receiver was stored for the last 38 years; it was clearly someone’s gently used, cherished Zenith.
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A folder of high resolution photosof this receiver can be viewed here.
Compared Against the Sony CRF-320
Besides simply enjoying receivers I get a kick out of comparing them against each other, and against various other ones owned by my radio hobby friends. Thanks to the loan of a vintage Sony CRF-320, I was able to directly compare it to my Zenith Trans-Oceanic Royal D7000Y-2 receiver. My friend’s CRF-320 is the equal of my Zenith in condition and quality. Each of us would like to own both of these radios!
This is an interesting pairing, since the Zenith was among the last of the premier, USA manufactured portable receivers (analog only, all hand-wired chassis), and the CRF-320 was an equally prestigious portable receiver of the “latest technology”–digital/analog readout with printed circuit board construction.
Once a leading receiver brand, Zenith did not react quickly enough to changing trends and business climate after the death of its founder, Commander Eugene F. McDonald. The 40 year old (1942-1982) proud line of Trans-Oceanics gave way to new, semi-automated methods of building receivers with inexpensive labor from Asia.
After an initial production run of the next (and last) R7000 series, manufacturing was moved to Taiwan. The receiver was built just as well as the previous Royal D7000, but used PCBs inside and the useful band spread frequency ranges were done away with (at the expense of ease of tuning). Still, Zenith T-Os couldn’t compete on price or performance against the Sony CRF-320, and the R7000 Trans-Oceanics were the last (and now most collectible) versions.
This YouTube video compares reception of these two vintage receivers with mid-morning signals on the 31 meter band, from the Seattle area:
Both radios were used with their built-in whip antennas although I couldn’t extend the Zenith’s its final four inches due to ceiling height in the room.
In my opinion, the CRF-320 is superior in keeping signals steady with its AGC, but the D7000Y-2 excels in audio quality and is neck-and-neck in most other respects. The Zenith may have performed a bit better with weak signals if the ceiling in my kitchen was a few inches higher! (Both radios have substantially long built-in antennas, and each are very well matched to their circuitry for excellent reception.)
There are many references around for the Zenith Trans-Oceanic series, but not a lot has been published on the CRF-320. Here is one page with good details on the Sony: http://www.shortwaveradio.ch/radio-e/sony-crf320-e.htm
I’ve been active on eBay since 1998. As with garage sales, the chances of an excellent “find” increase with the time spent in the pursuit. Sometimes you just get lucky though and find a very desirable item remaining unsold for days, such as this Trans-Oceanic! It’s all about being in the right place at the right time. Since I’ve bought the receiver I’ve yet to see any other D7000s of equal or better quality, despite some with Buy-It-Now prices of up to $450 plus shipping (edit 12/16: I spotted one that appears in equal condition to mine, but for a Buy-It-Now of $675 + $40 S/H).
Guy Atkins is a Sr. Graphic Designer for T-Mobile and lives near Seattle, Washington. He’s a regular contributor to the SWLing Post.
“The basic idea of the diode clipper is that for signals with an amplitude within ±0.7 Vpeak (less than about +7 dBm over 50 ?) the diodes are just open circuits and do not interfere; for higher amplitudes, the diodes clip the signal to about ±0.7 Vpeak limiting the maximum power that reaches the receiver at about +10 dBm over 50 ?, which the vast majority of receiver circuits can easily tolerate. If you wonder why I specified +7 dBm for unclipped signals and +10 dBm for clipped ones of the same peak to peak amplitude, it’s because unclipped signals are supposed to have a nice sinusoidal shape; once clipped, they become more square and their RMS voltage is higher, explaining the 3 dB difference.”
Thanks for sharing this, Mehdi! I’m happy to see that the PL-680 has some built-in ESD protection.
[The Squires Sanders SS-IBS is] a legendary receiver that either brought new ideas to receivers, or brought them to the amateur radio level.
There’s an article in QST in 1963 from Squires about this new stuff, I’ve never seen it so I don’t know if he’s talking in abstract terms, or revealing this receiver.
A big difference is that there’s no RF amplifier before the mixer, and the mixer is balanced. But he throws some of that out by going to double conversion, I assume for tuning reasons. The first IF is 500KHz wide, the first oscillator is crystal controlled and the second oscillator is variable, as seen in top end receivers of the day. The alternative would be a tuneable oscillator that was switched per band (instability from the switch, and the higher the band, the higher the frequency, hence stability) or mixing the tuneable oscillator with a crystal oscillator before feeding the first mixer, which can cause spurs without proper filtering).
The second IF is 1MHz, and having a filter so high was relatively new, though maybe some rigs had moved up to HF filters at the time.
It apparently is fussy about the antenna, or matching, because of the lack of RF amplifier.
Soon there’d be receivers that converted to 9MHz or so directly, saying goodbye to most image problems. Heathkit had a general coverage receiver later in the sixties that had an IF, with crystal filter, at 1680KHz, a relatively cheap receiver with much greater image rejection on the higher bands. The ham band only Heathkit HR-10 used the same IF and filter.
The Heathkit HR-10 (Source: Heathkit Virtual Museum)
Then a bit later, synthesizers arrived that made it much easier to build better receivers.
There was a wave of building using the 7360 balanced mixer used in this receiver, and frontend q-multipliers to deal with the lack of front end selectivity. But as semiconductors and ICs came along, it became much easier for mixers to be balanced or double balanced.
Thanks for this insight, Michael–sounds like the Squires Sanders SS-IBS was quite the innovation of its time. Thank you for sharing!
Friday, I brought home an untested, slightly grimy, Sony ICF-5500W. I purchased it through Goodwill for $20.
I crossed my fingers as I put three C cells in the radio and turned it on. Fortunately, I was rewarded with brilliant audio. I tuned the ‘5500W on AM/mediumwave and heard CFZM, 500 miles to my north, and Radio Reloj, 860 miles to my south. A quick scan on the FM dial revealed that I could also hear all of my local benchmarks. Whew!
Other than the dial needing a little calibration, and DeOxit on a few pots, it’s in excellent mechanical shape.
I started cleaning the radio last night using Q-tip cotton swabs and a vinegar/water solution.
I’d like to restore the hard plastic chassis’ original shine, though.
I was tempted to reach for some Armor All, but stopped myself short. I know it would give the ICF-5500W a nice shine, but would it cause any long-term damage to the black plastic or clear dial cover?
I know there are vintage radio restorers among the SWLing Post readership. Can someone offer advice on what’s the best product to use (or not use!) on my ICF-5500W?
Many thanks to SWLing Post reader, Monti, who knows that I have a serious affinity for 1940s era receivers. Monti writes from his home in Australia:
Sometimes when browsing eBay you’ll come across a hot item that wasn’t even on your wish list or Followed eBay Searches. This was the case for me early last month when I spotted a new listing for a Zenith Royal D7000Y-2 Trans-Oceanic that’s arguably the best performing T-O ever made. It’s not the most collectable (the final R7000 series has that distinction), but is the final model with the desirable band spread tuning arrangement. The D7000Y is also the last of the hand-wired Trans-Oceanics. Some claim this model has the best audio of the transistorized T-Os, too.
Once a leading receiver brand, Zenith did not react quickly enough to changing trends and business climate after the death of its founder, Commander Eugene F. McDonald. The 40 year old (1942-1982) proud line of Trans-Oceanics gave way to new, semi-automated methods of building receivers with inexpensive labor from Asia.
