Why does the Marantz 10B Tuner sound so amazing ???

The guy that calibrates all of my test equipment recently purchased a 10B that was in very good shape. After going through and aligning it, he was utterly amazed at the sound quality. He directly compared it to a few well respected tuners head to head. When telling me of the results, he kept laughing about how much better sounding the Marantz was than anything he threw at it. Amongst the big name tuners, the oft mentioned MR 78 was one of victims that he made specific mention of. He also mentioned another Mac tuner that it beat, which he said is a better tuner than the MR 78. Seeing as how i've already got almost 20 tuners as it is, i'm not in the market for any more*. Sean
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* Well, maybe just one more. I've always liked the Sherwood Draco Micro-CPU 100, but never owned one. Designed by Larry Shotz, i would have to imagine that it at least sounds decent and had good sensitivity.

Yes it is that good unless you believe the tuner experts at a certain web site then the 10B is only so so. Ha!

Ron-C

There was a really good article on the 10B several years ago in Vacuum Tube Valley. Or was it Sound practices? Higly recommended reading. Dig it up.

Aside from the exceptional tuning front-end and all-tube circuits, I think the big difference may have been the six IF stages. Yeah, six. Far more than anything else you can buy. And I believe the filters might have been phase-linear, resulting is the cleanest and most selective IF bandpass possible. Another plus was that I think they used a discriminator circuit instead of the usual FM demodulator.

So it probably isn't the front-end or the audio back-end that makes the sound so clean. I'd wager the sonics are due to the linearity and bandwidth of the IF strip and demodulator circuits.

jh

YES! Great tuner!! Magic !! I picked mine up directly in Long Island City when it was new!! I think they moved to California soon after that.

I have owned two of them in my audio lifetime and now make do with a Luxman T110. If you don't live in NYC, what good is it to have the world's finest tube tuner? Here in Washington, DC, there is one good FM station with decent quality FM music broadcasts, but that is IT for FM. This is what keeps me from buying another 10B.