Vintage Radio Review: Philips B2X80U Tube Radio.

The first in a series of reviews of vintage radios!
The B2X80U: amazing looks, amazing reception, mediocre sound quality.
Despite its flawed sound quality, i absolutely love it, and i'm sad to see it go back to the owner!
If you use it with a bluetooth receiver, with some more effort you could get significantly better sound quality out of it. For broadcast reception, there's a definite difference in sound quality between stations. Radio Caroline is one of the better ones.
The external antenna used later in the video is a active magnetic loop antenna from France. In my situation, it gets me better reception than an outdoor longwire because of high interference levels.
This radio is owned by a customer of mine, who wanted this radio to be prepared to be used safely and reliably. All paper (tar coated) capacitors were replaced and the electrolytic was leakage tested - leakage current is well below the maximum allowed current.
All tube radios need to have a technical inspection before putting them in use. If i had plugged in this specific radio right away, it wouldn't be a question if something would burn out - but when it would burn out.
This is a hot chassis AC/DC radio. If you get a Philips radio, make sure the grub screws that hold the knobs in place are fully screwed in, and that the screw holes are filled with wax or sealing laquer.
The radio relies on capacitors between the chassis and gramophone/antenna/earth inputs for safety. Good quality class Y capacitors need to be used here, to avoid the risk of a 230v electric shock.
The audio in this video is recorded with the internal camera microphone - but pretty representative for what you hear in real life.