Michael Black wrote:


"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.

By 1971 I suspect that most of the old companies were simply names to be
rented out, much like today. Most of the actual manufacturing was done
in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong by companies that dared not use their
actual Asian names on their equipment. That's why so many of the
Japanese companies used non Japanese sounding names on their stuff-the
memories of Pearl Harbor were still very fresh at that time, and
Americans didn't want to admit that Japan was kicking their asses on
consumer electronics. I suspect that the main selling point of the name
"Sony" was that is didn't sound like Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Same thing
with "Panasonic", which is still made by Matsu****a. (Can you imagine
the average American trying to pronounce "Matsu****a"? Apparently the
suits in Tokyo saw that coming and used the name National at first, then
Panasonic.)

Horrible quality wasn't a detriment when you were talking about a small,
four transistor MW only radio, but once SW got popular in the 60s and
the Japanese moved into that field the lack of design and quality really
became apparent.

On a side note, I heard on World News Tonight that there's virtually NO
manufacturing left in America anymore. All the jobs have gone to China.
Americans are using debt to prop up their purchase of Chinese stuff. I
wonder what will happen when that ends. China and the US need each
other-we buy their stuff, and they use our dollars to prop up Bush's
spending spree. So basically the two governments are using massive debt
to prop each other up, and eventually the whole house of cards will
collapse. The Chinese are happy now, but support for the CCP is weak and
once the world stops buying their industrial output the commies will
REALLY be in trouble.


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