McIntosh MR78 upgrades?

lewm

cleeds, I am not in any way challenging your statement that FM radio is a "huge industry" in the US, but with all respect can you explain the why and how that works?

Sure, @lewm .
There are more than 10,000 FM radio stations in the US and more than 6,500 of them are commercial operations. There are also about 10,000 translators. Total annual revenue, including the non-comms and about 4,700 stations on the aging and struggling AM dial, is about $20 billion.

Radio station ownership has undergone substantial consolidation since the FCC changed the rules in the mid-90s. Just a handful of owners - iHeart (which used to be Clear Channel) , Cumulus, Entercom and Townsquare - own the bulk of the major stations. And some of the non-comms are also owned by sophisticated and well-funded entities.

So even though the industry is facing many challenges to its profitability, including the impact of Covid on ad sales, FM is big business, and it relies on the huge installed base of analog FM radios, especially in cars. Many of these listeners are "casual listeners" who enjoy FM for convenience. The industry couldn’t get them much interested in so-called "HD Radio" and that may help explain why no one seems to have any appetite for fiddling further with FM.

The AM side is another story altogether though, and there it is possible that it could evolve over time into a digital-only band. There is a pending FCC rule that would allow the first steps towards that.

"I heard the "77" would be more musical sounding than the "78" model (without mods).  Did someone on the forum comared them ? "
Back when these were current models I was a salesman and sold both.  The MR78 was hands down the better tuner overall, but if a person did not live in an area with a lot of multipath, the MR77 worked as well, sounded as good, but not better.  The current modded MR78, however, is just better in every way.  I hate to say best, but in my experience it easily is a match for a properly working Sequerra.

Thanks, cleeds. You obviously know the subject quite well. Nowadays and for about the last 8 to 10 years, most new cars come with the capacity to receive SiriusXM. In my case, I tried SiriusXM in my car, on a lark, and now I am really hooked on it, to the extent that I don’t even try to tune in AM or FM stations, except for one sports station in my area on AM and one PBS station in my area on FM. So I would expect that SiriusXM might be a threat to FM , especially as and where the primary use for FM is to broadcast music with some fidelity. Music and PBS/NPR.

I guess I'm getting into this conversation late. Just sending my MR-78 in for the Modafferi mod. Got his office unit from our kids pediatrician 20 years ago when he retired; he kept the MR-80 he had at home. It has served well, but the quarantine has me listening to more FM. Looking forward to the change. My cousin, a retired Boeing engineer responsible for avionics for the 787 (yes, I used to tease him about Li-batteries), has the MR-74 and we've done a side-by-side comparison. He likes his and I like mine: who can argue with that? I guess we'll do it again when the 78 gets back. The two main stations that I listen to mostly are classical (PBS) ands a distant independent (jazz). I support both and suggest that as an important way to keep FM on the air.