Top Ten Tuners of all Time??

Luxman T-14. Audio quality is limited only by the quality of the broadcast signal. I think this is true of a number of tuners, but the slim (2") Luxman gets extra points for sheer beauty and layout of controls.

McIntosh MR-71 with Richard Modefferi upgrade. The original MR-71 is very nice sounding. The reception, sound stage and frequency response go one step further after the mod. It sounds better than my $1000 CD player.
However, the broadcast station is also important too.
I've compared to MR-80 ( to warm and dark in my setup) Onkyo 9090 MK II, and Dynalab Etude and they don't even come close. It also looks very classy. Definitely work the collection and enjoyment. I would love to try the MD108 but I can't see myself spending $5000 for a tuner.

How many of you folks have ever compared identical models i.e. one Pioneer TX-9500 vs another Pioneer TX-9500 etc... against each other ? I've done this on many occasions with as many as a half dozen identical models at one time. My findings ? Every tuner is different due to mass production parts tolerance and alignment variations. As such, it is possible to get a "Super Duper FM 1000" that kicks ass while the next one off the production line was a complete lemon. As such, if you were the one that got the "lemon" and / or the one that "kicks ass", your results might be very different from

I currently have about 20 tuners ( several of them listed above ) with at least four of them that i've not had a chance to listen to / use as of yet. I've probably had close to 100 different tunes over the years, but that is nothing compared to folks like Franz and other "radio-heads" : )

One of them that i never had but always wanted to check out was the Sherwood / Draco Micro CPU 100 that Macrojack mentioned. These are supposedly hard to maintain nowadays and it has made me leary enough NOT to buy one. Anybody else ever have one / still use one of these "babies" ??? Sean
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I've been able to compare just a couple of similar tuners, side by side. Denon TU-800's and Luxman T-117's. In these comparisons the differenmces, while there, were very subtle, and I could have lived with any of the units compared. Of course these are very small sampling rates and don't account for much. I think the point is well taken.

sean...Your comment about unit-to-unit differences was very true in the days of analog tuners, where exact alignment of multiple stages of tuning circuits was as much art as science. With today's digital tuners and phase lock loop chips I had the impression that unit-to-unit differences were small, although I must admit that I never had a bunch of the same models on hand to compare. I did have a tuner where the biFet front end RF amplifier transistor was blown, (so the RF gain was 1) and the tuner still worked fairly well. I suppose that RF gain variations could occur and produce the effect you remark upon.