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Blaupunkt tube amp in a TINY console. Save it?

Urchinn

Urchinn

AK Subscriber
Subscriber
Okay, I just came into possession of this rather beautiful Blaupunkt console. Its so darn small and cute that I'm wondering about saving it. I'm not a tube expert, though, so what is the skinny on Blaupunkt machinery? Quality or crud? The amp plays radio beautifully but the turntable sounds like half hiss half electrical buzz. There is also a Perpetuum Ebner TT (look in turntable forum for pics) that I don't know a darn thing about. What do ya'll think?
Also...there are more photos in the TT forum. I can't upload them here for some reason.
 

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Almost certainly worthy of restoration and use as-is, ol' son (nothing wrong with mono, as you know!).

Do you have a list of tubes in it?
 
The amp and radio is all one chassis. I'd hang on to the whole thing and play it after an overhaul. I've never owned any Blaupunkt stuff, but I've never owned a German radio that didn't perform better than it's tube count said it had a right to. Its mono, but it should have tape and/or phono inputs so you can use it as an amp if you'd like. FM performance will probably be very good and the AM generally rocks on these things. They are a little tight under chassis, but pay no attention to the horror stories. They're not *that* bad to work on.
 
Its YOUR set, but I'd think that you oughta leave it the way it is, after recapping, etc, I think you'd have something to be VERY proud of...These Cherman sets usually sound great & look as good as they sound.
 
Yeah, I'm thinking I'm going to save it. It gets NPR and sounds pretty great. I don't know anything about recapping...but plenty of AKers do it in the Boston area. I think the only mod I would want is an indiscreet switch somewhere that would allow me to bypass the turntable (whenever the whim takes me) and hook up an SD card full of mono stuff.
 
one (or more) of us can help you out.
"teach a man to recap and... umm... well..."
(he'll end up with a basement full of hifi junk)
 
the blaupunkt radios sounded really good. what you have is a table radio and not a standalone amp. its worth restoring. if your not into the restoration thing post it up for sale on craigslist or something like that.
 
Urchin scanned and posted some of the literature that accompanied his 1958/59 Blaupunkt Amazonas model 4521 musiktruhe (German for "music freezer" - my favorite foreign word for console, although schrank might be the more literal translation.) over in the Turntables forum. The page from the owner's manual that shows the operation of the control panel is really cool. Check it out:

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showpost.php?p=3533759&postcount=7
 
Thats pretty typical for late 50s Euro sets. The cheaper ones don't have the tuning eye or the visual indicators for the tone controls though. The band selector mechanism on these is a bit intimidating, big interlocked slide switches, and some of them have what amounts to a tuning transmission to shift the knob from controlling the AM to the FM variable capacitor. Others had dual ganged knobs, one for FM and one for AM. Basically the idea was you could tune your favorite AM and FM stations, and switch between them with the band selector, without having to tune between frequencies. usually other than a good cleaning of the switches, they don't need a lot of work.
 
I have a Blaupunkt console, the radios on those are pretty hard to work on. On mine the radio totally fried and I was left with the console which wasn't too bad, since it had a mini bar in it. An old Sansui lives in it now.

I think it's worth putting new filter caps on that though, it looks like you have some room to put them if need be.
 
I'm having a lot of fun with the little magnavox mono console I brought home last week - if the tuner and amp are going to be a restoration project - ideally it would be kind of nice to repurpose the console with a different amp --

the question I have is, if you don't have a mono amp to use, how would you connect up a 2 channel amp to a little mono console speaker setup?
 
Hopefully this will not insult anyone but the German engineers knew how to build a radio. Avery Fisher recognized it and after WWII sponsored a number of them to the US and they formed the backbone of the engineering team that made some of his finest equipment. Blaupunkt made some fantastic units and for a number of years if you wanted the best of the best in a car radio it was Blaupunkt. Rebuild it and you'll have a really nice mono setup. Notice the speaker system for it, nothing skimped on.
 
Rod Beauvex said:
Be careful working on and using that. I don't see a transformer anywhere.
Click to expand...

It's in there, BURIED in amongst all the other stuff. My Nordmende Isabella is the same way. Transformers buried on the inside of the chassis or in a cutout so it's 1/2 in|1/2 out of the chassis.

I copied the schematic and posted here.
 
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I don't know of any German sets that didn't have a transformer. They're usually designed to run on various voltages from 110 up to 240v, and they have multiple transformer taps to get that done.
 
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