Top Ten Tuners of all Time??

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.

sean

yer comments about tuna wariabliity are spot-on - even for todays current "school" of digital tuna. that's why getting a highly-regarded species serviced and aligned, right from the get-go, is a great idea. i'd recommend ed hanlon of antenna performance specialties, bill ammons, from the fmtunerinfo.com site, or stephen sank, owner of talking dog transducers...

re: the sherwood micro cpu, there's a li'l info about this on the fmtunerinfo site, or ya can post a question to the yahoo tuna forum...

regards,

doug s.

El: Even with "modern digital circuitry", there are still PLENTY of unit to unit variations that one has to deal with. I work on mass produced PLL based transceivers on a daily basis and see identical units that perform from one extreme to another.

Doug: I hear ya and agree. I've got a $15K signal generator at work and can do this myself but i've never gotten around to it. While part of the problem would be that i would like to have a service manual for each tuner that i have, the other part is that working on this stuff would be too much like work for me. The carpenter doesn't want to come home to a leaky roof and i don't want to have to take my tuners to work : )

As to the Sherwood, i've seen the info on the tuner website and even have an original review of it. I've talked to a few shops about these and their opinions are typically that they are VERY hard to keep running. I would imagine that this is like any other product though. That is, once you get it into the hands of someone that knows the in's and out's of it, it becomes a lot more manageable. Sean
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