Masco TVB
The The Mark Simpson Company (MASCO) was a long-time manufacturer of commercial audio equipment, specializing in PA systems and components. I suspect they got caught up in the excitement and possibilities of the post-war television boom, and jumped into the TV booster market. This model TVB was a fairly late design and it shows the advances they had made in circuit design, styling and marketing by 1953.
This is a fairly sophisticated unit. It is a two-stage design, both permeability tuned. A 6J6 first stage operates as the usual balanced push-pull triode design, but it is followed by a grounded-grid 6BZ7 dual triode power stage. Input, interstage and outputs are all tuned together, and high and low bands are selected by shorting portions of the coils. Input and output are link-coupled, and accomodate both 300 and 75 ohm transmission lines. Power is from a transformer and selenium rectifier.
The cabinet is of painted steel, in a dark "mahogany" color. There is an AC outlet on the back into which the user could plug the TV receiver. Masco evidently decided to name its models, as so many TV manufacturers did, and the "Cascadian" moniker represented its cascade circuit in a more consumer-friendly form. Period advertising claimed that the Cascadian booster could boast up to 35 dB of gain.
Updated October 18, 2011