I haven't paid enough attention to the real early stuff, but recall a Scott (E.H. Scott) set featured fantastic radio + amps/speakers, for the affluent du jour. State/art much like Marantz with the "10B" FM tuner in the '60s -- they provided variable BW filters for the IF stage, clever RF stage -- thus, in a good signal area, the full AM band audio could be detected with bloody good fidelity (equally: could narrowed for pulling distant stations out of the noise - like say: KSL Salt Lake, known to broadcast orchestral music all night.)

The sound quality was said to rival the early 'hi-fi' efforts decades later, save only the limited high-end == broadcast std. limited. Some early AM transmitters did exceed 10 KHz. While the pictured one might be the Scott I'm thinking of - the weight! probably means this was some one-off experimenter's special. Wish they's bothered to ID the sucker..

This [link|http://www.radiomuseum.org/m/scott-radi_usa_en_1.html| Scott list] shows a '40s model with the early 50 MHz FM band with 33 tubes.
(before new band allocation orchestrated by RCA/Sarnoff as sabotage: get around Armstrong patents and kill his competitive Yankee Network.)

Never heard one of these live.