I have a beautiful 1932 FADA console with doors and 6 legs. but the company went bankrupt the next year. the other FADA radios that are tabletops are a different company. the catalin ones are sought after and nice but upwards of a thousand dollars.
silvertone means it was sold by sears. so a Sears silvertone radio could have another maker. you might notice the same things happening with other departments store models such as fleetwood , Admiral, baycrest Philco is ford. You ll find other makers like montgomery ward, firestone, Everready. If you look in schematic books you will see listings for many companies ending around 1932 as they went into bankruptcy.. but also there were many many radios made in the early 30's.. although economy was tough, people put a little aside because they wanted to stay home and hear what was happening in the world. not having a radio was the equivalent to not having internet access today.
with early FM dont' be caught into buying one if it has the Armstrong band. this first version of FM never caught on and the radios are more useless than a beta VCR.
"The FCC made its decision final on June 27, 1945.[40] It allocated one hundred FM channels from 88–108 MHz, and assigned the former FM band to 'non government fixed and mobile' (42–44 MHz), and television channel 1 (44–50 MHz).[40] A period of allowing existing FM stations to broadcast on both low and high bands ended at midnight on January 8, 1949, at which time any low band transmitters had to be shut down, officially making obsolete 395,000[41] receivers that had already been purchased by the public for the original band."
- from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrongsome of those 395,000 recievers are still floating around waiting to surprise people, they won't receive anything useful.
I have lots of Bakelite radios of different case designs, they are fun to collect.
If you wanted an FM radio to actually play and listen to on a regular basis I would pick one of the European radios from about 1965. these are often coined "piano key radios" most of them have a row of white push buttons.
these radios used electrostatic tweeters, the audio by far surpassed most of the US made radios.
I have this one , it's a fairly advanced radio from this era. You get the warm sound of tubes and the FM with the electrostatic tweeters. youl find names like Grundig, Nordmende, and a bunch of others, they all seem to be good performers. they are also usually tubes mounted on early PCB boards. If you look for one check it over well. they all have a lot of plastic bits and that early plastic does get brittle and each is different enough that you can have a real challenge getting parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkk15XrEwtoI have one of this model. a blaupunkt , I think this is one of the best tube radios for every day listening as it is old enough toe still be tubes and new enough to have some good audio.
moving into the transistor era I would suggest one of these. Zenith made a lot of tube transoceanic and this was them morphing into the transistor market just before the Japanese market basically killed any production in the US and Canada of electronic goods.
early transistor radios like this are usually good performers and often they do still work well. I have one that still works like this and it sounds pretty good as an everyday radio with a little style .. the maps were a cary over from other transocianics , they show when it is best to receive short wave based on your location..
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... Transistor)_Radio,_Chassis_18ZT40Z3,_Made_in_the_USA_(12125520946).jpg
here is an early Sony Gendis radio. I have one like it. you can see how they used the wooden case idea but this is a transistor radio, not tubes. this one is AM. note the early sony logo.
http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/sony_sony_ ... is_tr.html this isn't the first Sony radio but it is an early one. I paid five bucks for mine, which was a nice deal.
This is an Am transmitter. You cna buy it as a kit you build yourself and there are other designs that you can build. with this unit you can use your ipad or a FM reciever or whatever you want to as the source. then it broadcasts a low strength AM signal.. so you can stream from your phone or whatever you like and rebroadcast that on the AM band and then you can tune any Am radio into your stream, which could be an FM station.
https://radiojayallen.com/sstran-amt-30 ... ansmitter/so with this workaround you can use any Am radio to play FM.
I've also got a little unit that is an FM reciever and it is for a car with an early AM radio. It is a little FM reciever and it will rebroadcast the FM signal it is tuned to, but not over the air, you have to couple it to the car antenna and tune your AM car radio to a set frequency and this will also make FM play out of the AM radio.
most of the early pre-war radios are nice to listen to at fairly low volume, they have a warm sound you don't get from modern solids state gear. it suits our old houses. They are not suitable for listening to ACDC or rap music at high volume, they don't have the bass to handle too much of that. you would just damage the old and tattered speakers,, some of the higher end consoles do pretty well and will fill a room with sound quite nicely but they are not suitable for high volume rock. of course if you dontl; shake them apart you can play what you like.
If you want an old radio keep in mind that they all need some restoration. new filter capacitors at the absolute minimum.. buying an unrestored radio in "working" condition and putting it into use with no restoration is possible but it usually ends in the radio failing to work properly.
Once restored they are safe and reliable and can be used daily with no issues. If anyone here wants to try restoring one or would like to purchase a restored one I might be able to help point you in a the right direction. I dont have enough room to even display all the ones I have properly and many are just rough ones in waiting for restoration but it is a really fun hobby.
Phil