Zenith Table Radio - Look at the sounds.

"Oh boo hoo. Waah waah. Everything was better then. Everything is terrible now". Well, as with basically everything, it's a non-simple mix of "yes" and "no". This ad for a gorgeous Zenith table radio makes you want to go all "waah waah".

It sure is pretty. Look how deco and geometric it is. Much of the consumer products landscape here in the future has been designed to look all swoopy and blobby, as if one left one's consumer product out on the driveway on that one day in July when the sun chose to go triple nova. Your poor radio/vacuum/microwave, all bendy with the blown-off quanta.

This Zenith cost thirty bucks in 1954. That sounds a little steep. The old inflation calculator says that's... OOF! $240! For that, you got a radio that looks great, stores no presets, connects to probably nothing via an "aux in" jack, and has an analog tuner of the "nylon string wrapped around a pulley" type that dissolves into sibilant noise as soon as you take your hand off the knob. Two weeks after buying the radio, the volume pot would get that corrosion on the copper contacts that makes adjusting the volume sound like "KSSHT! kh-kh-kh KUUH! KKKSSHHHHT!" Aah, the golden age of wireless.

For my money, the digital tuner is the single greatest development that radio has enjoyed since it's invention. Second greatest: digital volume control.

Let's say you walked into your local Best Buy's Noyze Zone and plunked down your $240 and said "give me your best". First off, the best thing you can do after walking into Best Buy's audio department is to walk right back out before the Corporately Mandated Hipness Demonstration Subwoofers loosen your bowel.  But, maybe your car broke down and you're stuck there.

Well, it won't be easy to spend $240 on a table radio. The first thing that your Eminem-looking associate will show you is probbaly something like this Sony XPLOD plastic aorta  for $129. It's been overdesigned with the exact same degree of effort as the Zenith in the old ad, but with rather a different sensibility. The chosen name of the XPLOD brand tells you everything you need to know about their idea of audio fidelity, regardless of your chosen price point. For $240, you can get two XPLODs and make them into a pair of headphones with some of those really long zip ties.




If you simply must spend $240 on a table radio, you'd do better to get this Boston Acoustics iObject dock in Stormtrooper White from Amazon for $249. Radio with more presets than there are decent stations in any one language. Solid build quality. Various in and out connectors. No CD mechanism. Sound quality that will make you take a few days off just to finish being impressed with it. The menu system is cryptic and frustrating, though, until you get it figured out. It could use Bluetooth audio streaming. Also, pity it looks like you paid $100. The Boston radio isn't especially clever or pretty (apart from the auto-dimming backlight on the display), but the ghetto dynamic of XPLOD's mouth-breathing troglodytic product developers makes the Boston look positively inspired. Too bad all the really good industrial designers work for Swedish companies whose point of entry is, shall we say, "prohibitive".

So, like it or not, you do get a lot for your money, thanks to science. If only the ghost of Zenith past would have come and worked some magic on the Boston Acoustics design department.

[I know this looks like a review or a promotion for Boaston Acoustics, but it's not. It's just a decent radio that costs about the same as the old Zenith.  -Mgmt.]