"patgkz" ) writes:
What a horrid, miserable radio. I owned one brand new in 1971 as ordered
from Allied radio shortly before their demise.

The A-model has a bit more IF bandwidth due to one IF filter stage being
eliminated and replaced with a jumper wire on the circuit board. This spoke
volumes of the crappy design: imagine, the "improved" A-version actually
has less parts due to the fact that an entire stage in the IF was removed!

My 2515 model suffered from excessive drift, instability, bandswitch
glitching, microphonics, poor sensitivity above 20Megs, scratchy
pots.....and that was when the darned thing was NEW!

The A-model may be more desirable due to its selectivity being wider than
that of a razor blade. AM on my 2515 was absolutely miserable and devoid of
any detected audio above 1,500cps. It always sounded like you were
listening to a radio with a paper bag over your head.

No wonder Allied fizzled. This was the Company's last, dying attempt at
marketing a house-brand "communications" receiver. I can see why anyone at
TRIO would never admit to desingning the fool thing.

I don't think it's unique to Allied. At that same period, a lot of
the old US companies and manufacturers went to solid state and Japan
for their receivers. The art hadn't developed much, and people wanted
cheap receivers. So you got a lot of junk, and in many cases it
wasn't made by the company, merely labelled with the company name.
I've heard it said that the companies were unable or unwilling to adapt
to solid state at the time, so rather than invest the needed research
and energy in solid state design, it was farmed out.

Virtually everyone had a low end solid state receiver at the time of
dubious quality. Something like the Hallicrafters S-38 was pretty bad,
but it was built with tubes and at least the designers knew tubes well.
It took more effort to make a good solid state receiver, and that wasn't
happening at the time, at least not at the low end.

My Hallicrafter's S-120A was horrible. I suspect that Ameco cheap
transistor receiver that tuned to 54MHz was likewise not very good, though
that's just a guess based on time an price. Lafayette, Radio Shack, probably
even Heathkit had similar receivers.

Of course, I'm less certain that such equipment killed the companies. I
suspect they were at the end of their long runs, and the fact that things
were changing and they didn't change with it helped.

Michael