Tuner or Receiver

Look up the Tuner Information Center....  http://www.fmtunerinfo.com/index.html#audiophile
and you will have subjective sonic results of lots of tuners..  Based on extensive reading I acquired a near 45 year old Sansui TU-9900 fully modified by Mike @ Radio X.  It blew three CD players out of the room until I got a Sony XA 5400 ES which was/is a Class A rated Stereophile component.  There are some very highly rated old tuners that can be had for a couple hundred and then modified later when finances allow.

My only concern with buying older gear now is the potential for a failure of some kind and not being able to have it repaired.  Unless the new Tuner technology is superior to that of my Carver or Onkyo I will likely just stay with them.  They work well and do a good job of pulling in weak stations on FM.  And the audio quality on both is good.

I am all in favour of Internet Radio, so my old Quad FM3 now sits unused. FM radio is an old technology with serious limitations with regard to frequency response, distortion and channel separation. Also, most stations compress dynamics to make it all fit into the constraints of the technology.
Of course, Internet radio is not perfect either. Many streams are at low bit rates, degrading the sound quality to a varying extent. So the question is the balance between the degradation from the FM technology vs the degradation from low bit rate streams. The good news is that with time internet radio stations have increased the bit rate more and more. BBC Radio 3 for example now has 320kbs streams (only in the UK), which their research has shown is indistinguishable from lossless FLAC. Even so, they are curently experimenting with lossless FLAC streams and these certainly sound very good. In my experience in a blind test I can just about distinguish 256 kbs from lossless, but only just, and not very reliably. The same applies to most other people. So my conclusion is that certainly with higher bitrate streams like 192 or 256 kbs internet radio’s imperfections are far less than those of FM radio. And there is the almost infinite range of stations. An dthe future looks even better: with cheaper bandwith more and more stations will move up to higher bitrates including lossless Red Book resolution.
As for these big older receivers, I love them with their knobs, dials, meters and brightly lit screens. I have an older Kenwood/Trio receiver, and it sits unused, but I cannot bring myself to get rid of it.

willemj

I am all in favour of Internet Radio, so my old Quad FM3 now sits unused. FM radio is an old technology with serious limitations with regard to frequency response, distortion and channel separation ...
Of course, Internet radio is not perfect either. Many streams are at low bit rates, degrading the sound quality to a varying extent. So the question is the balance ... my conclusion is that certainly with higher bitrate streams like 192 or 256 kbs internet radio’s imperfections are far less than those of FM radio.

There are a lot of variables in assessing the SQ of FM vs. Internet radio. But given a good FM tuner, a good signal and a good FM station, the results will walk all over most Internet streams. Of course, optimum FM reception conditions may be more the exception than the rule, so it's easy to embrace Internet radio. For me, it's not an either/or question - I listen to both.

Agree with Cleeds