With the passing of time, there are (through my direct experience, aggregated over decades) some emergent biases, some acknowledged, some not.
These are just my observations and I acknowledge that they are also limited to the perspectives of a single source and the complications arising from there being "no privileged reference point in the Universe". MOST of ALL when it comes to something as environmentally influenced as FM tuners or (or stations/transmitters/studio front ends for that matter). So, my take is this:
1. There is a pretty severe bias toward Kenwood tuners. The Top Kenwood may be deserving of its placement, but I’ll never know because they’re badly overpriced and rare, which segues into #2.
2. If it’s "weird", rare or the result of an evolutionary offshoot marketed as "cutting edge" (new or old) then it’s prized/inflated for those very reasons. The exceptions are the inexpensive tuners at the very top, which are mostly (again, see #1) Kenwoods. I’ve owned multiple samples of all of them (the 990D and the 5020) and they are both critically flawed and seem to fail often in exactly the same way. The front ends lose their ability to demodulate the 19kHz Stereo carrier which causes the tuning center displays and the Quartz Lock to cease working. Alignment isn’t the problem. I’m two samples deep on both models and I won’t be spending money on a third for either. They’re cheaply made, have poor shielding and their longevity is suspect. I acknowledge that Kenwood/Trio/Accuphase have blazed a lot of trails in amateur Ham Radio and I won’t dispute those acknowledged trailblazing honorifics. It (like Nakamichi with Cassette decks) gave the next, anti-biased brand something at which to aim.
#3 A pretty severe anti-classic Era Pioneer bias. The unjustly vilified F-93 Elite (and the identical sounding, but feature-handicapped F-91 Elite) should be at the top of anybody’s list who doesn’t live within 4 miles of all the stations one wishes to listen to with full quieting. The F-28 (I haven’t owned a 26, see the earlier comment regarding rare/exotica) sounds very nearly identical to the F-93/91 grandchildren and so close to the TX-9800 and TX-9500 II’s that the differences are very nearly not worth contemplating. The F9/90/99x are to Pioneer what the 990D/5020 are to KW. Underbuilt, ergonomically handicapped with their audio sections struggling to compensate for longevity-crippled RF sections.
#4 Tuners like the McIntosh MR78 and Yamaha T-2 are badly undervalued compared to the tuners that rank above them.
Space Weather, Terrestrial Weather, and the day-to-day variations in us, the end user wetware can dwarf the differences that we obsess over with respect to FM Tuners. That won’t stop us from doing it, but it does mean that any list is worthy of a certain amount of skepticism. I value the ricochets more than the list itself. What can be said about the shootouts themselves is that they have encouraged debate and reexamination. I think Mr. Rivers threw a couple of "berserkers" onto the list just to provoke that exact kind of engagement, and I respectfully submit that it worked beautifully. In the end, not the worst thing that could happen. I’d reserve that appraisal for the programming that’s driving the format to irrelevance. (Everyone’s mileage varies...)
