McIntosh MR7083 vs. Magnum Dynalab MD100 tuner

I received an email from a Magnum Dynalab FT 101a owner who reports the unit "does not have good sensitivity". He says "he is sorely disappointed in its inability to pick up any but the strongest signals". I am now getting concerned about the Magnum Dynalab MD100 tuner. Other friends have suggested I buy the McIntosh MR78 tuner. If you own the MD100, please provide me with your comments. Other tuner recommendations are requested to include the MR78. Thanks

The MR78 seems to have quite a cult following. I have never come across one in all my McIntosh swapping but on ebay, there are bidding wars over nice MR78s and they can go up to $1800 for perfect in-box ones. There were a few threads here in the past where owners raved about them. It is apparently a classic tuner with outstanding capabilities, even today. Check the archives. I would consider it but I find it a little old and don't want to deal with maintenance work on them. Arthur

I own two McIntosh tuners - an older MR73 and an MR7082.
I bought both of them used, had them aligned and checked over by my local McIntosh dealer and had both restored to "as new" condition.
Both sound great - though I consider the MR7082 to be the better unit in terms of pulling in distant stations. The sound from both is very rich and dynamic - nothing thin or nasal about the reception from either. I've heard the Magnum Dynalab FT 101A in the past at an acquaintance's home and though it sounded great. But he also was pulling in a nearby station that has a fairly powerful transmitter.
If you already have McIntosh gear, the MR7083 would probably work just great with your setup. If you decide to go with the used MR7083, make sure it was aligned and checked out by an authorized McIntosh service dealer. I mention this, because there are a number of Mac dealers who sell the line but do no actual service work. Good luck!

This is easy. Buy the Mac. Most tuners are not fed a
good signal; people attach a little wire to them and expect
great things. Wrong. Have a good signal and both tuners
will work well. I lean toward Mac because they will probably be there years hence when Dynalab is a faint
memory.

I have had a MR7082 since it was new back in the 1980's. It struggles with the very weak distant stations that are low output as I suspect any tuner would. I appreciate the information that I should probably stay with this tuner. ( I use it with a homemade integrated vacuum tube amplifier, 6J5 parallel feed connected to choke loaded mu follower 6SN7 feeding a pair of 245 triodes to woofers by direct coupling active filtering and the midrange-tweeter of my speakers. Considering the price and affordability of buying any amplifier that has these features I like, do I look like a television evangelist?) 
I went to great labor to build an antenna selector switch with led displays of the stations to which I put up towers and outdoor FM antennas to get the best reception I could from classical music FM stations.
Now I am worried that all that will become obsolete garbage if the new administration in Washington shuts down all the public radio stations and all broadcasts of classical music. This limits whether or not I might someday have my tuner aligned by a professional shop. Also, the FM stations use digital 150 kbits so analog is irrelevant. Sometimes I have to use my laptop connected through a usb that outputs similar digital output to an MSP Platinum DAC then to my homemade amplifier.
I would hate to see all that FM setup become but a souvenir of a time before society and its culture under the fascism of totalitarian democracy insists, "You don't need Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, American Idol CW disco is good enough for you. You don't need Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Dickens, Victor Hugo, National Enquirer and Harlequin romance novels are good enough for you. You don't need to live in the architecture of Matti Suuronen, a trailer is good enough for you, let us demolish the Taj Mahal and replace it with a complex of casinos and a NASCAR track and tear down the Sagrada Familia Basilica to make room for a sports stadium surrounded by McDonald's and Burger King to bring it up to date with the times. Don't talk about Heisenberg and how you think it relates to Kant's categorical imperative, talk about sports and be passionate about your favorite team like everybody else so that you will be more popular. And start eating normal food, Doritos, Kellogg's fruit loops, and Wonderbread and grow a beer belly so that you will look like everybody else. Isn't it worth it to do what it takes to get along in the world and be a success rather than be yourself, to accept how the world demands you define who and what you are rather than having the arrogance to decide for yourself who and what you want to be? In the end, the question is not that you can survive without the arts and those cultures created by those who gave it everything they had to make them most beautiful because, unlike the producers of corporate commercial culture, they implicitly presumed the humanity and human dignity of their audiences, it is whether a life of game shows, fantasy football, trailer parks, and junk culture music offers a life worth living.