"The Other Mike" wrote in message
news
On Thu, 22 Jun 2017 17:30:12 +0100, "NY" wrote:

I remember in the early 1970s my friend's parents had a Hitachi colour TV
and it had a tint control (we had fun tweaking it just before his granddad
wanted to watch the snooker!). I understand that Hitachi didn't pay the
royalty to use a genuine PAL decoder and converted PAL to NTSC and then
used
an NTSC decoder (or something like that).


The Sony 18 inch from that era also had something similar but they called
it a
hue control. It also had a shedload of wirewrapping between boards rather
than
using connectors.

Ah, maybe the Hitachi also called it a hue control, which amounts to the
same adjustment. I don't remember my friend's parents' TV suffering from
what I now know are called Hannover Bars compared with our (fully
PAL-compliant) TV, which I'd expect if they didn't use the PAL delay line.

On a Bush 26 inch from the mid 70's you removed the back and a panel could
be
swung up which had all the setting up adjustments in sequence complete
with
instructions.

That may be the one I was thinking of when I described that panel with
knurled knobs and/or pots that you turned with a screwdriver - Granada may
have rented the Bush to customers.

I remember that in the early 80s, my parents stopped renting from Granada
and bought their first TV (a Bang & Olufsen) and the sound quality was a lot
worse: probably because the audio bandwidth of the sound decoder was wider
but the amplifier wasn't similarly improved so sibilance was a problem (as
it is to this day with female newsreaders' voices on Radio 4 in FM - the
Charlotte Green effect!). The shop where they bought it said they'd had
quite a lot of complaints and came out to tweak things - not sure whether
they improved the amplifier bandwidth or filtered out the higher audio
frequencies from the IF decoder.

When I got my first VCR, which had SCART and phono outputs, I connected the
sound to my hifi and realised what I'd been missing by listening through a
tiny speaker and poor amplifier in my TV. When I got a later VCR with NICAM,
the difference was even more noticeable. I don't think I ever used the TV
speaker after that - I always used headphones and my hifi from then on.