Tuner recommendations

If you like simple & easy, ignore MD. For that matter, I wouldn't spend much on a tuner unless you live near a high quality radio station that is worth the $$$ or if you live in the middle of nowhere and need a great tuner to pull in weak stations.
Why? Well, a couple of years ago I got a full tour of WQED in pittsburgh. This is our high quality classical station. I couln't believe the gear! two 300 disc sony single bit changers as the main source. They were upgrading to hard drives while I was there. All of their music was being compressed onto massive hard drives for ease of use and storage. This took them down to the same quality at satellite radio. Since then, most of the other stations in pittsburgh have gone to hard drives also.
What a bummer? I sold my MD101 and bought a cheaper denon with a remote. I gave up on high quality radio.......

Go vintage. I had an older Sansui Tu-717, Kenwoods are good too. The 717 was a significant upgrade over a Magnum Dynalab FT-101A Etude, and it only cost a couple hundred bucks. It's not often that you can save big $$$ and get better sound. The golden age for tuners was in the late 70's and early 80's. They simply don't build them like that anymore, for under $2K anyway.

I said had, because I sold it after I realized I went 2 years without using it. Too many sources, LP's, CD's, SACD's, DVD's. I needed to clear rack space for sources, so the old tuner and analog cassette deck are gone.

Cheers,
John

John is offering good advice. Analog tuners are the way to go.
For under $200, you can get nice Sansui or Luxman tuners that will crush most $800-900 new digital tuners in sound quality. Believe it or not, but Ebay is the place to get the best deals. So many tuners, not much demand, especially for 70s analog, the best decade by far.
Follow Ltkije's link http://www.fmtunerinfo.com. It's the best info out there. I spent months looking and ended up w/a $60 Luxman that outperforms my old digital Tandberg at 1/10 the price! Cheers, Spencer

I have heard the Fanfare, Yamaha T2, a modified Rotel 940 and a Kenwood 917 tuner at home in my system and the Kenwood was by far the best of the bunch. I was skepital about a vintage tuner (the Kenwood was made around 1980) but it had stellar sound which is really nuanced and beautiful tone and is my recommendation.

Hello Nrchy,

I spent many years without a tuner and built an all McIntosh Magnepan system for records. Well I got the bug for FM again, both for N.P.R. news & talk as well as music. I shopped tuners on A-Gon and eBay for a few weeks. I bought a Pioneer Elite in perfect condition for $55.00. What a steal. Then I put up "THE BEST POSSIBLE EXTERNAL ANTENNA" I could find. I get perfect FM, and I am very happy.

You can buy the greatest tuner made, but without a quality antenna, you will be cheating yourself on sound quality. I bought the least expensive fanfare and put it on my patio cover. Get a good used, high quality tuner at a bargain price, and put the rest of your money into a great antenna and that should do the trick for relatively few bucks.

Hope this helps