Tuesday 10 December 2013

The new king!

This is my latest and greatest (ever!) Remember that Blaupunkt I found on the side of the road? One tube-swap and polish later and it is KILLER!


26 comments:

  1. Hi - does this have a grey glass pane in front of the screen?

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  2. Yes, this TV does have a glass panel. As you can see, the image is still vibrant. The glass only has a subtle effect and it's certainly not a bad one. If anything, if removes a little of the glare creating a slightly more defined image.

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  3. It looks amazing :) I just asked as I'm picking up a B&O MX7000 (with grey glass) & it's good to know that the glass doesn't affect the vibrancy of the picture.

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  4. Have you ever come across one of those:
    http://www.ebay.de/itm/Blaupunkt-Rohrenfernseher-MX72-83-DSP-/271393021422

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  5. Wow! That's nuts Alex! Man, so much good stuff in .de!

    I'm going to Berlin for 3 months this year... hopefully I can send back some lovely chassis to hook up to tubes when I get back home!

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  6. I've just lost out on my third attempt to ship a Loewe from Germany - the first 2 broke ;( Never mind :) I might have to make do with the rather poor selection here in the UK. I wish we had the Blaupunkts and Loewes you get is Germany & Australia, but they somehow didn't reach us.

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  7. PS. I'd be REALLY interested to see you do an appraisal of a B&O MX6000/MX7000 ;)

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  8. I'm picking up a B&O MX7000 tonight and would also love to see a review & how Andykara2003 got along

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  9. Hi Eksetreme - It turns out that I won't be getting mine for about 2 weeks now so I'll definitely post my thoughts then. Really interested to see what you think of yours :)

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  10. I got mine last night.. I'm in love! :) The previous owner was a little shocked that I wasn't the big B&O fan like himself and only wanted to re-purpose it, but too bad for him, hey?. Although I have only got snow so far, the issues I have come across is that since it's quite an old unit, the service menu is only accessible via shorting a pin inside the cover. I'm yet to open it up, but I plan to install a momentary switch on the chassis to easily do this. Also there is a very minimal OSD, nothing like the user manual pictures. It's all remote driven displayed partially on the remote LCD. On the back of mine it shows Type 78/85 SW 2.0. I think you need 3.0+ for the remote driven service menu and full OSD

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  11. Great blog! Do you have any surplus SCART TVs for sale? Need one for a cab i'm putting together. Anything from 63-68cm would be great!

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  12. Nice one Ekstreme. I think you're right, you need to access the service menu by taking the back off the tv pre SW 3.1. Looking forward to your assessment of the RGB picture quality...

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  13. Hooked up the old (original) Xbox to it last night for some testing. After an hour of playing Battlestar Galactica, I'm pretty happy with it. I need to get into the service menu still to clean it up a little, but WOW, I'm pretty impressed, great colours and brightness. Sound is almost good enough I think to use it as my cab sound system

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  14. Really glad to hear it. I'd be interested to hear how it compares in vibrancy & sharpness to other TV's - especially a Sony Trinitron. I'm hopefully getting mine early next week (SW4.3 - with the remote accessible service menu) so I'll get back to you as soon as I've tested it.

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  15. Hi - just to say I picked up my B&O a couple of days ago & didn't like it at all :( I know some people love these TVs & it's just opinion, but it was way to dim a picture for me - mostly because of the dark glass screen cover. It's the newest version too (NT, SW 4.4) which is supposed to be sharper than the older ones, but it was no where near as sharp and vibrant as my Sony - even after doing some adjustments in the service menu. Oh well - I have a Loewe Contur 2063 being shipped next week (Last of the E3001 chassis ~2003) so I've got high hopes for that one :) I have new couriers who shipped a lot of CRTs back in the day so hopefully this might turn up in one piece....

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  16. Firstly - THANKS DALE!!

    Thanks to your help, I finally found a shadow mask TV that is incredibly vibrant and sharp! This Loewe is the first TV I've seen that I can say is better than my Sony which is saying something. The colours are even richer and the picture is cleaner. Every other shadow mask I've found is way less focused and 'muddier' - including the B&O. The blacks are truly black & the image really leaps off the screen.

    I have to say that for me, the E3001 TVs come last in the style category though. The only E3000/E3001 that I really like the look of is the Calida - I've never liked the look of having the speakers either side of the screen. The trouble is that the E3000 calidas are so old now and the E3001 calidas stop at 55cm which is too small for me. I like the idea of the E3001 models as they apparently have improved focus and are up to 10 years younger than some of the E3000 models.

    So for me, in the style category, the B&O is at the top and Loewe at the bottom - but in picture quality it's the other way around. I'll probably collect a few more Sonys & Loewe E3001 chasis TVs either way :)

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  17. Why did you swap the tube and what tube did you use? I'm asking because I picked up an MS70-79VT for 1€ yesterday. It's still in my trunk but I'm really looking forward to add external pots and do everything to make it perfect. It has the FM500.70 Chassis installed and looks like new. The owner had it serviced with a brand new flyback transformer a month ago.
    Some info on your swap would be awesome.

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  18. Hey Alex!

    You lucky man! I'm very jealous... these TVs are absolutely awesome for use with GroovyMAME. The picture is as good as I've ever seen and they are very easy to modify for external pots thanks to the removable deflection board inside. Makes soldering so much easier!

    I swapped the tube because the tubes in Grundigs/Blaupunkts of this era can't compete with the darker, higher contrast tubes that Loewe used in later model TVs. Fortunately, the newer tubes can be used with the older yokes without any issue.

    I took an A66EAK tube from a Loewe 3470. This is the best type of A66 Philips tube I have encountered. The appearance is darker than the original tube that Blaupunkt used. I can't remember the tube number off the top of my head...

    Changing the tube in the MS 70-79 VT isn't the easiest (lots of ribbon cables to manage) but it isn't the hardest (the B&O LX 2802 took years off my life... mission impossible!). In both cases, the results were remarkable and well worth the effort.

    My MS70-79VT was caked in mud (had been on the side of the street) so I slowly cleaned the PCBs and outside casing. It also has a fault where the image becomes too bright suddenly. I ordered a new flyback and service manuals and everything is sitting in storage ready to go. I'm travelling this year though so it won't be another 6 months at least until I get to it...

    If you need assistance in getting a new tube in there, I can certainly provide advice.

    Nice score! Again, so jealous!

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  19. I just took the Blaupunkt to the basement for a quick checkup - seems like the 1 Euro was the right price after all :-/
    There was no picture at all when I hit the power-switch for the first time - turned it off and on again and the picture came up, stable position but almost all red and turning brighter (too bright) and darker every once in a while... until it slowly dimmed away until the screen was all dark and never came back.
    I opened it up and discharged it.
    Even the set was looking great from the outside, it was so covered with dust and hair I thought it was growing a pxxxy inside... The seller told me when I picked it up that it was serviced and got a brand new cascade, I highly doubt that. Infact, I believe the flyback and cascade along with a few obviously deformed caps are the cause of the fault.
    There are some caps which I am sure will be very hard to buy, there is one cap that must be the biggest mother of all caps I've ever seen.
    On the right side there's a pcb which has connectors for 2-pin-ribbon cables, they come in red, green, blue and black - the red connector is cracked and certainly faulty.
    Well... all in all nothing to be jealeous of I guess :-/
    I took the chassis out and documented all the connectors and plugs a had pulled. I will have to take it apart completely to fulfill the cleaning-process on this one.
    I only know the basics, I guess that's the least you have to know when collecting upright arcade cabinets, so this won't be too easy to fix for me - I also lack an oscilloscope which has been on my wishlist for quite a while. The only chance for me to get it repaired in a decent amount of time is to contact a tv-technician I know, if he doesn't give up on the device so won't I.
    I have a spare LOEWE which I was about to trash although it's in perfect working order because it's a 100Hz model (Profil Z) which I had realised too late after I took it to the basement. Dunno what kind of tube is in there but I'm gonna find out soon enough.
    Anyways - here's my picasa with some pics of my mess:
    https://picasaweb.google.com/115948745418514736250/BlaupunktMS7079VT?authuser=0&feat=directlink

    I wish you a great trip! I'm in Cologne so that's almost half a thousand kilometers from Berlin so we won't seeing each other. If you need any assistance, advice, help, translation or whatever just drop me a line.

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  20. Damn! That's a shame.

    You should be fine to replace those caps. I've looked on Mouser, Digikey, etc. and the important caps are all there. Maybe you'd need to get slightly higher voltages but that would be fine.

    Donberg sell flybacks and transformers but they're very expensive. Probably it's cheaper for you just to wait and hope that another unit becomes available. For me, that is extremely unlikely because very few of these older Euro TVs are available in Australia anymore.

    That Profil looks like the perfect candidate for a 70cm tube swap! A tube like that in the Blaupunkt would be amazing!

    Hopefully your technician friend can work some magic... Your chassis looks much better than mine! A blast with an air compressor and it would clean up good. My mainboard still have dirt and mud caked on it. Despite all that the picture is superb.

    There are a few different Grundig and Blaupunkt models with the same chassis. I'd still keep an eye out if I were you...

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  21. A little somehing for your trip to berlin: http://www.ebay.de/itm/Blaupunkt-MS-63-109VTM-funktionsfahig-/271425525898?pt=DE_TV_Martin&hash=item3f3238d88

    Yeah, I will either repair it or get another chassis but I won't let it go.
    Is it true that 100Hz TVs have different tubes that can only be used if swapping the? I heared tubes like A66EAK...X and any number higher than 13 are 100Hz tubes.

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  22. A little update on my Blaupunkt:
    I found the same model on ebay and just asked the seller if he could strip it and send me the chassis. Happy End: he agreed and now I'm getting a working chassis :)
    Next task is to get a Blackline tube from a 50Hz-LOEWE which are very common around here so I'm looking forward to have a working TV pretty soon.
    Let me know if you every need any parts - since I have 2 chassis now this wouldn't be a problem.

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  23. Hi guys - I'm intrigued about the Loewe/Blaupunkt combo. Is there any other advantage to using the Blaupunkt chassis & not just using the Loewe as it is - except from being able to display the correct amount of lines of resolution?

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  24. Alex: that's great that you found a replacement chassis! I can't believe that the buyer agreed to gut the TV for you. That's really cool! Hope it all works out...

    It will be a while before I'm back home and can work on my TV so I don't know what spare parts I'll need yet. Perhaps you can box up the left over chassis for the future? I have done that with a few Loewe and Grundig chassis.

    Andy: the advantage is that you get better support for 240+ line modes and also analog control. I would say the picture is slightly more "classic" looking that the Loewe E3000/3001. Certainly there a couple things that are clearly better: horizontal linearity for one. However, as you know, the E3000 has pretty awesome image quality so I wouldn't lose sleep over that!

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  25. Cheers for that :)

    My new 70cm Loewe (E3001 chassis) just turned up :) It's brand new and has been kept in a basement as a backup. I'm drying it overnight to get rid of any moisture gathered from it's trip from Germany.

    I haven't taken the back off but looking through the grille, there's not a speck of dust inside - it looks like as if it came straight from the factory. Here's some unboxing photos - I'll test it out tomorrow....

    https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33671586/Loewe%20Contur%202070.zip

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  26. Quick question for Dale: I've got the chance to buy a little used CT1163 - is there much difference between the E3000 and E3001 Loewes? I love the sharpness & good contrast of the E3001 TVs & wouldn't want to take a step backwards in quality.. Cheers :)

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