m II schrieb:

I'm assuming Grundig was sold to it's new present owners in the last few
years. Then the decline started. In an attempt to fatten the bottom line
in the quickest possible time, they started cutting corners very
severely. It may be coming back to bite them on the ass. Twice!

Grundig USA a.k.a. Lextronix a.k.a. Etón never had that much to do with
the European company (the radio/TV etc. related parts of which were sold
to the UK based Alba and Turkey based Beko early this year but which had
been going downhill for a long time). The last "European" Grundig SW
receivers were the Yacht Boy 500 and Satellit 700 (along with the 900
that was not to be), along with the Yacht Boy 360 which was an
interesting hybrid of Fürth style docs - I have a service manual - and
typically Asian innards (Japanese transistors etc.). The YB 400 was a
Grundig USA product, suspected to have been made by Sangean. Current
Etón/Grundig USA radios are just slightly adapted Tecsun models. The
Satellit 800 is a rather interesting beast as it involves both Tecsun
and Drake (with the former producing it and the latter having developed
the SW8's circuitry which gets used to a large extent).

The Germany-based Grundig IMHO was strongest in the early to mid, maybe
still late 80s. I have an FM tuner from this period, a T 7500 - it may
not have the high quality looks of others and lacks a few features
(switchable bandwidth, attenuator), but sonically beat the pants off a
Revox costing almost three times as much in those days ('83 or so). (And
it allowed entering 4-digit alpha tags for stations and had an 8-segment
signal strength display that was pretty much exactly logarithmic, both
not really features expected in a tuner with little more than a
middle-class price tag.) The thing is solidly built, the only point
where they cut costs a bit too much was the rectifier for the +5V
supply, which was a historic selenium type (!) notorious for failing.
Now guess what went south two hours after I got the thing...
Fortunately, this is good ol' macroscopic technology and not tiny SMD
stuff.
But, err, I digress.

Stephan
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