Top Ten Tuners of all Time??

To answer Talmadge3's question about the Yamaha TX-950, i think that it is lacking in the sonics department. I am not passing judgement blindly, as i currently have one in my HT system. While it is LOADED with usefull features ( except a remote !!! ), the sound is not up to all the ravings. Treble is somewhat hard sounding with a lack of detail and smoothness. I also don't achieve the soundstage that i get out of other tuners ( Quad, Musical Fidelity, Magnum, etc.. ). I would have to say that compared to many of the other "mid-priced" tuners on the market, it is probably amongst the cream of the crop. It just doesn't stack up against some of the better, though still relatively inexpensive, tuners on the market. For those on a budget, the Quad FM4 and Musical Fidelity tuners are quite excellent as long as you can provide a decent antenna to them. While not the best on sensitivity, both provide very good sonics if the broadcast is up to the task. Sean >

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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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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I work on brand new units right out of the box and notice these problems even more than on used units in for repair.

Having said that, i can align a brand new unit after the manufacturer's recommended period of warm up and when it comes back in after a few weeks or months of use, many of the parameters of operation have changed due to break-in. As such, i always recommend a "follow up visit" after an alignment to bring things back into spec once everything has fully settled in. This goes for new or used units as they all drift slightly after prolonged operation. As i've mentioned before, the effects of "component break-in" ARE measurable and this is not debatable as far as i'm concerned. Sean
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