The Curtis Mathes syndrome

Dave Dial, a former Oklahoman transplanted to Los Angeles forty-odd years ago, explained this to me, and it rang truer than I'd prefer to admit:

Besides, a lot of those humongous consoles had old B&W sets in them; if not necessarily more cost-effective, it was a lot more appealing to buy a color set and park it on top, and if you were lucky enough to have one of the high-end consoles with a picture tube that hid behind sliding doors or louvers, no one need ever know your dark, deep secret.

Actual Curtis Mathes consoles probably suffered less from this syndrome than some other, better-known brands: the tiny Texas-based manufacturer's long-running slogan was "The most expensive television in America, and darn well worth it," and they meant it. But by the 1960s, parts were relatively cheap, and labor relatively expensive; if you were unwilling to mess around with the high-voltage innards of a television, you either wrote a large check or bought a new set. (This reality was ultimately reflected in the Curtis Mathes warranty: one year on labor, ten years on parts, still in effect when I bought one of their sets in 1981. I wrote about the experience here. That set, incidentally, was still working when I donated it to Goodwill in 2002, though the picture was a little greener than spec.)

I know the syndrome well, though. I had replaced the original factory radio in my old Toyota Celica with a radio/cassette unit. Eventually, the tape mechanism quit working, in a truly fascinating fashion: the transport had somehow locked itself into a position where it thought there was a tape already in there, which meant (1) you couldn't insert an actual tape and (2) it automatically cut off the radio. Faced with the possibility of having to crawl back under the dash and replace the factory unit, or buy a whole new stereo, I shoved a plastic dowel (actually part of an old Bic pen barrel) just far enough into the tape transport to defeat the radio-off switch, which left me with a dead tape unit but a working radio. This ad hoc fix lasted six years, two years longer than the duct-tape job on the exhaust manifold. (Don't ask.)

Conversely, I once had a fairly crummy $200 shelf-unit stereo whose turntable failed, which I replaced with a real live Dual 1215 hi-fi unit, thereby guaranteeing myself high-quality reproduction right up to the point where the signal entered the amplifier. In automotive terms, this is dropping a 351 Cleveland into a Kia Sephia.