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Sylvania

N

Northguy

Active Member
I drove to the big city today and I had some time to stop at a few second hand stores to check out the cd's and audio equipment. As usual I got talking to a guy about audio equipment, he was nice guy and he was looking for a particular vintage receiver that he had when he was young. The brand he thought was Sylvania and was almost 100% sure it was Sylvania, he said it had great build quality and sounded real good.

I told him I had never heard of a good quality Sylvania receiver or amp but told him back in the day lots of brands were quality and now present day they are not quality. Does anyone know if Sylvania made good stuff back in the day or was the gentlman just confused about the brand name?
 
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In the early seventies, they made some really nice looking receivers. Had thumbwheel tuning like a Marantz. They looked really nice and sounded pretty good. Not on a Fisher level but fairly decent. They looked great. The only think I didn't like was the RCA speaker jacks. Magnavox made similar units around the same time.
 
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By Radio and TV company console, compact, and component standards, pre 1975 better Sylvania gear was among the better available. I regard them much like Packard Bell but wider availability.
 
Agree with ggregg - Sylvania made some decent midfi gear in the early 70's.
Great looking, small footprint, good power. Gave one of the flywheel tuner
receivers to a friend. 50w/ch, nice system. Agree the RCA speaker jacks
sucked but those could always be changed out by anyone with a clue and
a soldering iron now. Don't overlook one if you come across one cheap.
Would like to get my hands on another one at some point.

BTW - I believe most of the better stuff from the early 70's was built at a
plant in Batavia, NY (30mi or so east of Buffalo).
 
The Sylvania CR 2742 and CR 2743 receivers had horizontal flywheel tuning (a la Marantz). My guess is that those are the ones that ggregg and jrbab were thinking of, and are a good guess for what Northguy's contact was thinking of.

I agree that they were pretty special, at least for the era. I'm pretty sure they used fully complementary output stages in the power amps, which was cutting edge stuff then. Lots of socketed semiconductors, for better or worse. (It was probably a mark of superior construction at the time, but they can be a source of reliability issues now that we're 40-ish years down the road.)

There's a thread with a link to a picture of a CR 2743 (among some other no-longer-good links) in the DIY forum:
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=367184

cheers,

chazix
 
Depending on when and where the guy grew up, there's a reasonable chance he had Phillips/Magnevox/Sylvania components. My first CD player was/is a top loading Phillips branded as a Sylvania, from about 1982. At that time, particularly in Canada, many of the Phillips amps, tape decks & even turntables were sold under the Sylvania brand.
 
I picked up a CR2742 a while ago. It was thrown in on a package deal. Took me by surprise, never knew Sylvania produced something that decent. I've given it a listen to (hate those RCA speaker plugs) and it sounded good. Haven't got around to cleaning the controls, very scratchy.
 

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i have a rat shack sta-250 that is the same as the sylvania cr-2743 with the realistic label on it, works and sounds darn good............:thmbsp:
 
old 2080 said:
i have a rat shack sta-250 that is the same as the sylvania cr-2743 with the realistic label on it, works and sounds darn good............:thmbsp:
Click to expand...

a pic of the shack version.............
 

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Sylvania bought the legendary German brand SABA in the late sixties. This is the very rare SABA 8280 (1974) which is actually a Sylvania RQ-4748. A great piece of gear - I have one!
 

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Northguy said:
Real nice looking receiver, love the look of the green lights.
Click to expand...

yep, i like it and it gets put in my rotation about once a year, the sta-250 was only available at R/S for one year, 1975,............:yes:
 
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