Fisher Model 70-RT (1954)
A tuner that Fisher's own advertising and a magazine masthead agreed on - which almost never happens.
Overview
Avery Fisher's outfit had been at the radio game since the late 1930s. By the mid-1950s its catalog was split between complete consoles and the "Custom Audio Components" line, which was separates for the builder who wanted to put a system together piece by piece. The Model 70-RT sat at the front of that line as the company's FM-AM tuner. It was the box you bought before you bought the amplifier.
Fisher's own catalog copy promised "extreme sensitivity, low distortion and low hum," with an Armstrong-system FM section, adjustable FM-AFC, and separate AM selectivity. Those are manufacturer claims, not independent measurements. Nobody has surfaced a bench test of the 70-RT with numbers attached, and the period advertisements that survive are just advertisements. The one contemporary verdict that's been preserved is in High Fidelity (May 1954, p.19), which ran the Fisher ad copy alongside its own editorial masthead. The magazine's tagline for the Fisher line was "Of the very best!" That line was a pull-quote the magazine allowed Fisher to use in its advertising, not a lab report. Still, High Fidelity was stingy with praise for tuner front ends, and the endorsement carried weight with hobbyists reading the back pages.
The 70-RT was not a standalone product so much as the head of a two-piece recommendation. Fisher pitched it explicitly as a companion to the Model 50-A amplifier, a 50-watt all-triode design the company described as delivering "100 watts peak" and staying "uniform within 1 db, 5 to 100,000 cycles." Whether or not the amplifier hit those numbers, the pairing shows what the 70-RT was for. It was the tuner half of a serious separates rig, not a console accessory. The 70-RT and 50-A appeared together in High Fidelity ads across 1954 - April (p.10), May (p.19), July (p.17), August (p.17), and September (p.29) - which gives a reasonable window for when Fisher was pushing the combination hardest.
The feature set reflects the transitional moment it was built in. Adjustable AFC on the FM side was still a selling point in 1954. It let the user lock in a weak station and then trim the automatic frequency control so the tuner wouldn't drift off it. The AM section's separate selectivity control acknowledged that the AM band was still worth listening to for anything other than ballgames. The "Armstrong system" reference in the advertising points to Edwin Armstrong's wideband FM, which by 1954 had won the standards war against the competing Crosby system but was still recent enough to be worth naming.
Fisher's "quality leader for seventeen years" line in the same ads dates the company's self-reported founding to roughly 1937. That lines up with the brand's emergence as a maker of high-end radio gear rather than a wartime contractor. The Model 70-RT is a product of that mature pre-stereo period. It is mono only, since consumer stereo FM was still several years off. Buyers in 1954 were assembling a mono system, and the 70-RT was designed to feed a mono preamp and a mono power amp, probably the 50-A sitting right next to it in the catalog.
The 70-RT is not a common piece today. The original capacitors and resistors are now seventy years old, and any working example will have been recapped by somebody. Collectors who own one tend to describe it as a tuning-quality piece first and a collector piece second.
Values are hard to pin down because the model trades so rarely. When one does surface, the price tends to follow the condition of the tuning dial and the cosmetics of the front panel more than the electronics, since the electronics are rebuildable and the cosmetics are not. The 70-RT's faceplate design is period-typical, a wide horizontal layout with the tuning dial dominating the center. Examples that have been drilled, repainted, or stripped of their original knobs are worth a fraction of a clean one.
Pairing the 70-RT with a Model 50-A is the historically correct move, but a modern owner doesn't have to. What the 70-RT really wants is a decent antenna. The whole point of the "extreme sensitivity" claim was that the tuner could pull in stations a lesser front end couldn't, and that advantage disappears if it's fed a piece of wire draped over a bookshelf.
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