This is a rant after being out on Saturday and once more opening a new, and crappy sounding CD. I appreciate your tolerance.
An excellent question, not just about tuners. As to your question, though:
As an audio dinosaur, I'd lusted after a Mac 78 for years. I found one in "time travel" condition. Even my Wife was amazed at just how "mint" this item was.
When I ordered it, I put over $700 into a mast/antenna and rotor and professional install. Man, I was really excited when I saw this beautiful piece. From it's pictures, I'd never seen any used gear in this condition, and I trade a good bit. It arrived and was just gorgeous.
Like the 3 days I spent reading an owners manual when I got a new car, I had the Mac aligned before anything was done. I sold it two weeks later, asking the same question you did and hoping to get my money out of it before every body else wised up and asked themselves the same question.
I did listen: I reached stations miles away that I listened to in college 35 years ago, and even local, self-professed, "high-quality" radio. Probably 20% of my current record collection was purchased after I first heard music over these stations years ago. Now, horrific, brain-dead programming and more compression than an mid-sixties big-block V-8 are the absolute rule, at least, until you're in the big cities.
I still have a space in the rack and think of getting a 10b or a Sequerra when I see a clean one, but I'm done with FM as a source.
I do have two sets of nice tubed mono-blocks, 3 DACs, 2 transports, $20k worth of turntable and such in one of my two systems, so I keep putting money into and enjoying the hobby, but the old FM tuner fantasy is gone.
I just enjoy the Serius unit in my car now. It, as they say, "knows its place". It sounds "okay", but makes no pretense to what I would call "hi-end", unlike the big, swaggering FM tuners of my youth.
I wonder what will happen when all that is available is mixed down with Pro-tools and the like. The last 4 or 5 CD's I've bought (in various music formats) have all been compressed and over-loaded the front of my system. I'll give them this: they were LOUD. They were also flat, even out-right distorted.
As Tina Turner may have asked: "What's loud got to do with it?" Hell, I've got a loud knob on my pre-amp. This is just like the over-driven, over-bright TV displays we all see in commercial outlets: it's meant to catch a brain-dead, ill-informed consumer's attention quickly for a quick sale (or down-load). Why do we "super size" mediocrity?
Christ, even Lindsey Buckingham's latest suffers from this. When he joined Fleetwood Mac, years ago, "Rumours" was so well produced and engineered that it's still being redone in ever-increasing high quality formats. I don't think we'll see his latest done that compliment (even though the I really like the music itself). I don't need to hear high resolution flatness, distortion and grain.
Nope, the money people forcing this "lowest common denominator" drivel on us have no concerns for anything past minimal quality. Current production methods, for items sold in normal commercial outlets, is nothing less than a damn shame.
It seems that FM was just the vanguard of increasing doses of crap and pablum available to us as consumers from tin-eared MBAs with no interest in music. I don't think we will find many John Hammonds among these guys.
A saying about the price of everything and the value of nothing comes to mind. Even the best concepts and music are being recorded and stored in poor quality originals, never to be available for improvement. FM's demise was the forerunner years ago. The rest is happening now.
I hope someone disagrees with me and cheers me up.
When Bob Dylan and Neil Young can't get it done the way they want to (and both of them are near deaf, I would suppose, and they can still hear what's being done to their music in the recording chain), what chance do newer artists, with lower sales figures, have of getting any type of quality sound out of an entire system built on price points, rather than quality?
Excuse me while I go harrass my neighbors, kick my dog, pull my pants up under my armpits and continue my rant about the good old days by muttering to myself, under my breath. This is not easy to do while trying to convince my Wife that I am not a crotchety old man, seriously in need of some other outlet.
