The best sounding FM Tuner is.....

About Sean's post up there... I agree with everything. And also: "fm tuner info" is one of the great white elephant websites of all time. I like Kenwood tuners, but there are plenty of good tuners out there, and if you look at the site, what you slowly start to realize is it's a self-justification for using old Kenwoods. Furthermore there is no baseline for quantitative vs. qualitative measurement, and very little actual evidence from oscilliscopes that any of what they are saying bears any relation to reality. All ceramic filters are better than IR's. No explanation. Modded tuners are always "better". Better sounding or better engineering tested? Again no answer. Wide bands are always better than narrow. Ridiculous. Then people start quoting these lunatics on ebay or over on the asylum and start flame wars over it. It's driven some things through the roof that, frankly, suck, while other great lower-priced-initially tuners languish. That site, TNT audio, which gets a lot of tech stuff plain old wrong (like ultralinear is always push-pull and triode is always single-ended; even in the same amp ...eh... wtf?) and also Arthur Salvatore's site about how Michael Fremer is defrauding people (which may be true, but the way he goes about relating his story is on the level of, I was abducted by aliens!) ...anyway, it all made me start a thread called: Do you believe everything you read on the internet? Audio is like everything else. Some people know what they are talking about, and some people don't. Being able to put up a webpage doesn't make you competent.

biomimetic, it is clear that you have only scanned the tic site & its related chat forum.

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huh? where else are you gonna find so much info about so many different tunas?

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huh? a close reading of the site makes it clear that there's scads of tunas, not yust kenwoods that are worthy of listening to. but, there's no escaping the fact that kenwood made way more than their share of tunas, which is why there's quite a few good tunas w/the name "kenwood" on it. and no, i am not a big kenwood fan - i tried & sold three...

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where on the site does it say there *is*? but, the fact is, specs *do* play a big part in the tuna ewaluations, which a close reading of individual tuna stats, & a following of the chat forum will indicate. and, the fact is, the participants are some of the best rf engineers around, & they *do* measurements. a *lot*.

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want an explanation? ask on the forum; you will get lotsa opinions.

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again, ask, you will get answers. but, in fact, you are wrong, this info *is* given.

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as is your statement that this is what the tic & the forum say. again, you have to be more thorough in your readings.

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huh? there's so few flamewars on that site, it's amazing, quite frankly. of course, agon is so strongly moderated, there really isn't even a conversation flow here. :>/

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sounds like what happens w/all reports about all other gear in audiodom, no? tho i disagree that there are reports of good tunas that are actually sucky. of course, i *do* have disagreements w/the opinions/rankings of all the tunas over there, having tried almost a hundred different tunas in my home over the past few years. examples:
- the revox b261 is excellent - on par w/the b760. but, the mitsubishi da-f20 is better than both.
- the tandberg 3001a is *way* over-rated. a decent tuna, for sure, but a reliability nightmare, surpassed in sonics & reception by many many tunas. equaled in sonics & reception by something as cheap as the hitachi ft-8000.
- mcintosh s/s tunas are only so-so sounding, exceeded by so many tunas it isn't even funny. they are exceeded by most every tuna i have ever tried, in fact. they *do* certainly have excellent reception capabilities, tho.

so, does this mean that i am a white elephant? cuz i have opinions about tunas that you or others may not share? no - it's yust one more data point on the chart. which is all the info on the tic & its forum is or is meant to be.

relax & yust enjoy the magic of a good fm broadcast w/a quality tuna of your choice on a revealing rig! ;~)

ymmv,

doug s.
but not everyone hears the same, eh?

My post was for Sean. No; I didn't just scan the FM Tuner Info site. It seems to have more or less spawned out of a local radio club's tuner shootouts, and the guys as well as the tuners are the same vintage. Baselines are biased, when they appear, and the guys who run it all use more or less the same equipment (Kenwood), except for the one off-center guy who uses a *gasp* Sansui. FYI- I actually use a Kenwood tuner, but I don't think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, which is my point: Accuphase, Sansui, Sony and several others all made great tuners you can pick up for around $60 now, that sound as good as many things that are hundreds of dollars more.

I didn't say that spec's don't effect things, but then again spec's aren't everything. None of the major designers lists whether they are using Rhodium plated connectors, what their topology is, how they wind their transformers and out of what (or if they buy them wholesale from others), if they use silver wire, what kind of capacitor construction they believe in, how many gangs and why, what kind of filters... so basically spec's can mean whatever you want them to, based on how you measure them. Fm Tuner Info though "has the answers" on "what's best" in the tuner world. Which is almost always a heads up that you are dealing with either an idiot or a zealot. Saying it sounds "good" to you based on some meaningless baseline is neither engineering or science. It also has nothing to do with applied audio theory. Does anyone really believe that a 500w receiver from Best Buy is a true 500w and sounds better than a 20w tube amp? And anyway, what kind of 500w? Class A, AB or D? Am I supposed to be impressed? Because I'm not.

And this is generally how I feel about sites like FM Tuner Info. The Vintage Knob I like, and to me is more just historical. For instance someone made a key statement above: the Marantz 10B "can be" one of the best tuners out there when aligned correctly, etc. Well of course it can: it has one of the biggest plates around, the 805 tube, and so by virtue of electric theory it must be one of the most sensitive and widest in audio bandwidth. But not acccording to FM Tuner Info. Not the MR71 either. They found both "flabby" and "grainy". Well... you can pretty much stop right there, can't you? Because either they don't know how to properly align a tuner, they don't know how or when to change a tube, or they're deaf. I'm not a "the-more-expensive-it-is, the better it is" guy, but those two tuners are top notch.

One of the reasons I like 6 Moons even though many of their reviewers are about 180 degrees from where I am on the audiophile spectrum is they actually tell you what kind of music they like, the dB level they play it at, and what their favorite components and room treatments are, and how long they have had them. You can kind of relate to someone then, even if you wouldn't want their system. "I put it on my oscilliscope in my basement" and it "sounds good" isn't good enough... ...I mean seriously... ...would you buy a car from a guy who told you he had turned it on and it came on ok, so he's sure it "runs good"? I think not.

Actually it's very hard to beat the sonics on a modded and properly aligned Dyna FM-3. Put that one in your chimney and smoke it.Have yet to hear anything but a tubed circuit sound good in a tuner.

Since this thread began in 1999, we have flogged this to death. In the 48 years of this hobby have had damn near every tuner through here tube or solid state.

No other component you will add to a system is more dependent on an outside source than a tuner analog or digital. Much of its performance is dependent on signal transmitted.Environment signal is transmitted through. From there it becomes the antenna used. I have never found an inside antenna to have the performance of a good outside antenna. Then comes into play the tuner itself. there is a wealth of good used tuners on the market. But any 20 year plus tuner is going to need some work, just nature of the beast, be it analog or digital.

With the vast majority of radio stations now owned by a handful of corporate enitities such as Pilot and Clear Channel and others of that ilk, this almost becomes a moot point. Signals from FM these days do not have the strength they once had, when many of these stations were independents. Programming is for the most part dreadful.

As for me I have gone to the Polk XRT 12 XM radio tuner and have solved my problem. Great music, no commercials, and the antenna problem no longer exists for me and at the paltry sum of .43 cents a day for the monthly subscriptions I get the music I want to hear as well as a lot of other great music,news and sports, I would otherwise miss with an AM/FM convential tuner. And the good thing is the Polk XRT 12 Tuner looks like a system component and fits right in with the other gear in the rack.

And as of this post date, Crown has released a home XM Radio tuner.