Favourite Hi Fi System Radio Unit?

[Bufo Bill]

I read quite a few threads about favourite radios or favourite separates, but I've never come across one relating to favourite radios designed for a hi fi system (I guess most of us will be mentioning separates, but all in one hi fi choices are welcome).
My personal favourite is my QUAD Acoustical FM 1, which has the best sound I have heard from any radio full stop. I hear about Leak Troughlines (is that how you spell it)? But I have never had one to compare, being a bit of a newcomer on a tight budget.
Love to hear your thoughts on this.

All the best from Bill.

[Edward Huggins]

Do you mean a dedicated Hi Fi Tuner (such as your Quad) or any kind of "Radio"?

[paulsherwin]

At the budget end, the original NAD 4020A or Denon TU-260L take some beating.

[Bufo Bill]

A dedicated Hifi tuner, including the units built into all in one Hifi "music centres" if you choose.
All the best from Bill.

[Bufo Bill]

I like the look of the NAD 4020A, the brown and cream labelling on the dial (scale?) is very cool.
All the best from Bill.

[Paul_RK]

Who wouldn't love the SAE Mark VI, a mighty instrument with Nixie tube frequency readout and a CRT tuning aid?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkCIdufSGS8 -

advance 5 minutes in if in a hurry to see the unit in action.

I have a Mark VIB, a very similar tuner but with push buttons replacing the four central switches: it sat at a silly price - was it £10 or £20? - in a village electrical shop and I'd have felt a churl not to buy it, but it has severe mains hum and the screen is dark so it's languishing somewhere in hope of receiving an overhaul sooner or later.

Paul

[Edward Huggins]

I would not regard the RF section of an all-in-one unit as a Tuner. It is liable to be compromised but some of the best of this type were the early 1970s Philips units.
My stand-alone Tuner favourites are the US Scott Valve FM Tuner, the early Armstrong AM Tuner with the 9khz Bandwith and the budget Denons, including the TU-260L.

[wd40addict]

Transistor: Audiolab 8000T, valves Heathkit FM-4u with AC-11 valve decoder

[paulsherwin]

The Denon TU-260L has a well deserved reputation as a fine budget tuner. What is often not appreciated is that Denon used exactly the same circuitry in their other tuners of the period, augmented by cosmetic changes and a few bells and whistles. Because they are much less well known, they sell for next to nothing, as happens with most tuners that don't have a following. A couple of years ago I bought a TU-560L from a local eBay seller for less than £10, and I was the only bidder. Inside it's a 260 with a signal strength indicator.

[RojDW48]

I have an early Philips solid state tuner/cassette/amp - all horrible DIN sockets and designed without reference to any notion of proportion or ergonomics....but the stereo tuner is really good!

[Radio Wrangler]

I dunno about favourite, but I was without a tuner for several years and then a Sony ST-S 730ES turned up on this forum, going for a song. It took a bit of a bash in shipping so I had to venture inside and straighten a sub panel to get the buttons all working and sort the rotary pulse generator behind the tuning knob. Surgery was 100% successful and left no marks inside or out.

This was Sony's top of the line in the late 80's. Operation is very easy and intuitive, the sound is excellent. It has a PLL discriminator which works well an it has a trick of linking it to the tuning lines of the front-end preselector varactors, so the preselector shimmies to track the FM on the incoming signal. This is supposed to reduce phase distortion from a narrow front-end. The distortion figures suggest that it works.

There's some review text on the fmtunerinfo.com site but you have to be selective in which contributors you let sway your opinion, shall we say. That said, it's reconed by them to be the equal of any of the other Sony top end tuners. It doesn't look special, so it's a bit of a Q-ship. It has the added bonus for me of fitting in with my XA5400ES CD machine.


Then I had the fortune to come across a Revox B261 tuner. Previously used by the beeb for monitoring or for off-air re-broadcast, so they obviously rate them. It turned out to be suffering from hum. A couple of reservoirs in the PSU had already been swapped, but it turned out to be a smaller capacitor that had run out of water from being stewed in a rack 24/7 for a decade or two. Some ESR metering showed the majority of 10u 35v jobs to hve gone high resistance. So a swap fest was the right thing to do. It sounds gorgeous. Th festoon bulbs were long gone so LED replacement was next. Being rack mounted, the plastic side cheeks were missing, so I've replaced them with ones I routed from solid oak.. Not original, but classy. I've since bought a B252 to go with it, and I'll make oak cheeks to match whenI've got round to sorting it.

The B261 has a push-pull mixer, individual diff amps in the IF, and uses anLC filter, not ceramic ones. Very straight phase/frequency, exceptionally low ditortion a delay line discriminator and a stereo decoder done with MC1496s and seperate ICs. Spiffing!

I didn't go looking for these specifically, a number of other types would have been of interest, but these are what turned up. I'm happy with the result.

David

[Ted Kendall]

I'm not sure that the vogue for valve tuners isn't about softening the raucous noise put out by many heavily Optimoded FM stations these days. Put first things first - a decent aerial, properly aligned, and don't skimp on the downlead. I like the sound that comes out of Quads, and I've had FM1, 3 and 4 in my time. More by chance than design, I'm using a Musical Fidelity Elektron at the moment, and that sounds pretty good, too.

Part of this is about the RF performance required where you live, and here I agree that the Denon takes some beating, especially at the price.

[Synchrodyne]

Agreed that local RF conditions and the aerial installation play a big part. For FM, I found the Carver TX11a and Quad FM66 both to be very good. In its time (mid-1980s) the Carver was presented as being designed for difficult FM reception conditions, although positioned somewhat short of the “supertuners”. The Quad FM66 was at least its equal, though.

For AM, the Quad AMII was the best I have used for wideband reception of local MF stations. With suitable quality transmissions, it delivered close to FM (mono) quality. In narrowband mode (5 kHz AF bandwidth) it was a lot better than the AM sections of much hi-fi equipment (The Japanese makers seemed to be particularly good at turning out relatively poor AM sections.) Also on SW it was at least as good as typical domestic receivers of the 3-gang, 1 x RF, 1 x IF type, and it could handle very large signals. The Carver TX11a also had a very good wideband AM section, with slightly wider “wide” AF bandwidth than the Quad (15 kHz vs. 12 kHz). But it seemed to be not so good in terms of signal handling.

Originally Posted by Edward Huggins

My stand-alone Tuner favourites are the …early Armstrong AM Tuner with the 9khz Bandwith…

Was that the Armstrong AM44? I haven’t found much information on that model, other than that it had four wavebands (LW, MW, 2 x SW), three-position variable selectivity and an infinite impedance demodulator. Its “44” suffix number I take to have meant four wavebands, four stages, in which case I’d assume that it was three-gang, with an RF stage and one IF stage. It was evidently intended to work with the A10 amplifier system, along with the FM56 FM tuner. (The latter was also the FM adaptor for the FC48 and EXP125C radiogram chassis.) It was still available in 1958, by which time the FM56 had given way to the FM61, but was not listed in Hi-Fi Year Book 1959.




Cheers,

[G6Tanuki]

I'm currently using my late father's Teleton GT-202 which dates from the very-early-1970s. Not "High tech" in either appearance or performance but for general FM reception it's OK.

I used to have a homebrew [built into an Eddystone diecast box!] FM tuner that was - to my way of thinking - the ultimate: based around a Larsholt strip bought from Ambit, along with one of the "DFM7" LCD frequency-displays. Tuning was by way of a 10-turn wirewound pot with a 6:1 Jackson reduction drive on the spindle: 60 turns of the knob to go from one end of the FM band to the other. The Larsholt front-end had three levels of IF selectivity and rather-more-than-usual in the way of signal-frequency tuned-circuits which helped to avoid too much crossmodulation when fed with the output of my old Fuba UKA8 - though I did sometimes need to resort to a couple of coaxial stubs when trying to receive distant stations which were directly in-line with the BBC National station transmitters.

Must be said though, I've always been more of a DXer than anything - I want to 'hear' a station not actually listen to it, so I rate receivers on sensitivity, selectivity, resistance to cross-modulation rather than the quality of the recovered audio. You don't worry about stereo separation when you can barely hear the signal above the noise.

[John Caswell]

I have a Magnum Dynalab MD100 fed from a Fuba UKA8 high up on a rotator.
Anything passing by gets sucked in.
I also have a B&O Beomaster 5000, which I have lusted after for at least 40 years. Needs a little bit of power supply attention.
I also picked up a couple of Larsen and Hoedholt (L&H) complete tuners on PCBs which i must get around to building into cases
I don't think I will ever go away from either.

John

[Lucien Nunes]

I always wanted a B261 back in the days when I listened to a Troughline, not least because of the reviews I read when it first came out, at which time it was totally out of my league. But the Revox's desirability took a nosedive when I switched to a Yamaha CT-7000 which has to qualify as my favourite tuner from my favourite period of HiFi (obviously there have been better tuners since). There is an argument for having another HiFi tuner online as the Yamaha has quite a significant limitation designed in; an IF like a yawning chasm and deliberately so. One would not want to alter that, out of respect for the original design, but it can be a nuisance amongst clutter. 7 gangs (2+2+2+LO), mixture of ceramic and LC filters, built like a tank and with timeless Yamaha looks that still blend in with everything.

My fallback at the moment is the tuner integrated with the SX-1980, which is a good tuner but no more than that.

[Beobloke]

I was given an Aiwa AT-9700 by a friend a few years ago, and thought I had found my "forever" tuner. Then I purchased something else. Something that had been living at BBC Broadcasting House for over 40 years monitoring the output quality of LBC radio (it still has "LBC" written on the plug - usually I would clean this off but I quite like it there!). It is the best sounding tuner I have ever owned and another friend sold his Yamaha CT-7000 in favour of one, so it appears I'm not alone.

And what is this beast? A UK classic like a Troughline or something huge and flashy like a Sequerra or a Marantz 10B? Nope - it's a B&O Beomaster 5000!

http://beocentral.com/beomaster5000-1960s

[Radio Wrangler]

Aye, that's the thing. I could have been perfectly happy if it had been a Yamaha 7000 that I'd stumbled across, and you with the B261. Both, and others, are sufficiently good that our results are set by the limitations inherent in the system and in the beggering about which goes on in studios.

The perfect tuner is impossible. If I designed one with a broad Bessel-shaped passband to give really low distortion and good flatness of the response, someone would review it and I'd get beaten up over its limited rejection of adjacent channels. If however I designed a brick-walll response, reviewers would praise its ability to handle a congested band and then beat me up on its effects on the sound. Often the most difficult design decisions revolve around what your gizmo will not do, because rarely can you have everything.

Quad and Leak did some very good tuners, designed for UK conditions in their era where bandplanning kept unwanted stations ar arm's length. Great selectivity wasn't needed, protection from overload ditto, and you could bathe in the sound of a wide channel. Then you see reviews of them from America, and they just don't understand that they weren't made for their market or their era.

I've just found a youtube piece of a recent performance of 'Starless' by King Crimson while John Wetton was still alive. It's gorgeous, and I have no difficulty listening to the music not the equipment. Yup, I need to get those discs!

David

[Radio Wrangler]

You don't surprise me. A friend has a Beomaster 5000 and has had it since about 1970. Delightful to use, and an excellent sound... and germanium transistors.

You don't see them very often.

David

[paulsherwin]

That's because they were expensive tuners designed for professional use. All tuners of that class are thin on the ground, partly because few were made in the first place but also because professional users have a bad habit of skipping equipment when refurbishments or relocations are done.

The opposite is true of low end and mid market domestic tuners - they were made in huge numbers, and the owners stuck them up in the loft when they got a new system. Supply greatly exceeds demand and you often see perfectly decent examples on Freecycle/Freegle.