Difference Between Sony ST-SA5es&ST-SA50ES tuner

I found this old thread and thought I would comment -

I just got a SA5ES tuner from ebay and the build quality is much better than the SA50ES. The SA5ES is much heavier with a bigger transformer. The SA50ES does have some cool features that the SA5ES does not have, like autoprogramming and automatic reordering of the presets.

Sensitivity seems about the same, and is much improved over the ST-S730ES (which would be such a nice tuner if it had better sensitivity).

Mark

Another thing to note is that the European version of the SA5ES does have a dot-matrix display as well as full RDS functions. I don't know if there are other differences.

That's true the European SA5ES is quite different from the US and Asian models, which seem to be about the same.

Judging by the pictures the European SA5ES seems to be a hybrid of the US SA5 and SA50. It has the same encapsulated front end as the SA50 but the transformer and analog board more closely resemble the SA5.

There is a European SA5ES on eBay right now. Buy it now is a little high and of course it is 220 volt.

Mark