Well adjusted and maintained versions of the Marantz and McIntosh tuners are terrific. The Fisher is pretty good too. I would add Naim tuners to the list.
I own a Magnum Dynalab Etude. This is an unfailingly musical, sweet sounding tuner, but a touch laid back. Still, a great tuner.
One of the very best I heard, extremely good RF performance (its ability to pull in more stations than anything else was staggering), very dynamic and punchy sounding, but a touch hard and transistory, was a Toshiba tuner someone tried to sell to me. It was from the early 1970's, and there is NO record on this baby. Toshiba itself offers no data on this model. The seller speculated that Toshiba has disavowed making this tuner because it may have been caught up in the scandals involving Toshiba inappropriately selling militarily sensitive technology. The inside of this monster-sized tuner is packed with edge connected circuit boards (this from the early 1970's). The build looked like a Tektronix oscilloscope. The seller wanted $5,000 for this 30-year old tuner. I don't listen to FM that much, and I pretty much stick to just one classical music station, so I passed on it.
I own a Magnum Dynalab Etude. This is an unfailingly musical, sweet sounding tuner, but a touch laid back. Still, a great tuner.
One of the very best I heard, extremely good RF performance (its ability to pull in more stations than anything else was staggering), very dynamic and punchy sounding, but a touch hard and transistory, was a Toshiba tuner someone tried to sell to me. It was from the early 1970's, and there is NO record on this baby. Toshiba itself offers no data on this model. The seller speculated that Toshiba has disavowed making this tuner because it may have been caught up in the scandals involving Toshiba inappropriately selling militarily sensitive technology. The inside of this monster-sized tuner is packed with edge connected circuit boards (this from the early 1970's). The build looked like a Tektronix oscilloscope. The seller wanted $5,000 for this 30-year old tuner. I don't listen to FM that much, and I pretty much stick to just one classical music station, so I passed on it.
