Lafayette LT-50
A wired-and-tested FM-AM stereo tuner that cost $50 more than the kit and saved you a weekend of soldering. The spec sheet reads like a boast from 1959.
Overview
The LT-50 was the factory-built version of Lafayette's KT-500 tuner kit. The catalog copy made the relationship plain: same chassis, same circuit, one assembled and tested at the factory for $124.50, the other shipped as a box of parts for $74.50. That forty-dollar gap between wired and kit versions of the same tuner is one of the more honest pricing structures in mail-order hi-fi. Lafayette wasn't hiding which one you were really buying.
What you got for the money was a serious piece of tube-era tuner engineering, as HiFI-Stereo (May 1959, p.33) noted when surveying the mail-order stereo tuners of the day. The catalog claimed "17 tube performance" from a complement of 11 tubes, four of them dual-purpose types, plus a tuning eye and a selenium rectifier. The FM front end used the Armstrong circuit with dual limiters and a Foster-Seeley discriminator. Lafayette quoted a sensitivity of 2 microvolts for 30 dB quieting. That is sensitive for a 1959 tuner, the kind of figure that pulls in distant stations without a rooftop antenna. Frequency response was quoted as 20-20,000 cps within 1½ dB, with a full 200 KC bandwidth.
The practical features were aimed at the awkward transitional years of stereo. There was a multiplex output for the then-new stereo FM standard, separate tuning and volume controls for AM and FM, and a five-position function selector. The FM section had automatic frequency control, so stations "locked" in once tuned, per the catalog, and it used cathode follower outputs. The AM side had its own built-in antenna and broadband circuitry. The whole thing sat on a single chassis measuring 33⅜ inches wide by 10¾ deep by 4½ high, and shipped at 22 pounds.
In the catalog, the LT-50 was the tuner in Lafayette's packaged stereo systems. Buyers who wanted a complete phono rig could step up to the HF-682 (or later the HF-675), which bundled the LT-50 with the LA-250 amplifier, a Garrard RC 121/11 changer, a wood base, and a pair of SK-58 12-inch coaxial speakers. The tuner was also sold on its own for anyone building a system piece by piece.
That survey concluded that the Lafayette was a legitimate competitor to the name brands at a mail-order price, not a bargain-bin afterthought.
A clean LT-50 comes from the stretch of the tube-tuner timeline when FM stereo was new enough that a multiplex output was a selling point, and a selenium rectifier was still standard practice. The tuning eye and the separate AM/FM controls are period features. The selenium rectifier is the maintenance item to know about, since those parts age and are best replaced with a modern silicon equivalent during restoration.
Lafayette sold the LT-50 as part of a system, and that's how most of them lived, bolted into a console or a shelf system next to an LA-250 and a pair of SK-58s. Finding one today usually means finding it still attached to its original system. That is both a blessing (provenance) and a complication (you're buying the whole rig or nothing). The tuner alone turns up less often than the kits did. The kit buyer was the hobbyist who kept his gear, while the wired buyer was the family that eventually traded the whole console in.
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