We had a Magnavox in my family that my dad purchased from a neighbor in
about 1960. While I was growing up, we always called it the "hi fi" (our
neighbor replaced it with a real hi fi). This thing had:

o A lousy FM tuner that drifted like crazy. You had to keep tuning it. AM
was stable and sensitive, but very narrowband.
o A rumbly record changer with a very low compliance crystal (not ceramic)
phono pickup. Tracked around 6 grams, maybe more. It sounded horrible.
o Maybe a 5 or 10 watt power amp. It might have been push-pull. I don't
remember the tube complement, but it had a 5Y3 rectifier which gives us some
idea of the amount of energy going *into* the circuit...
o The most horrible speaker system I ever saw. It had a very low compliance
12 inch "woofer" (with a very small magnet structure - the same open frame
rectangular assembly you would see on most cheap speakers built in the late
'50s), It can't have had any useful output below about 150Hz. I have no idea
why they needed a 12 inch speaker for a design like that, especially since
the cabinet was not tuned, sealed, or bass reflex. It was just open. The
sound from the back of the speaker simply radiated out of the back & bottom
of the cabinet (it stood on legs) and canceled out any wavelengths longer
than the distance from the speaker to the bottom of the front panel (about 8
inches).
o For the punch-line, it was a "two-way" speaker system. They coaxially
mounted a "tweeter" in front of the "woofer". The "tweeter" was another
conventional speaker about 4" in diameter. A non-polarized capacitor
provided the "crossover" -- or at least prevented whatever bass happened to
escape from the lousy electronics from frightening the "tweeter". The funny
thing is, they probably could have saved a lot of money, and achieved the
same mediocre result by using a single, slightly higher quality 6" speaker
with a whizzer cone.

Hi fi was certainly possible in those days, but most consumer products were
far from it. In the '60s, we called those big expensive stereo consoles
"coffins" because everything inside was dead. They were just musical
furniture, not audio equipment.