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Finding a Great Sounding FM Tuner

The site to visit is fmtunersinfo.com It is unbelievable of the info at the site. About 90 tuners were compared for best sound. Trouble is top ten FM tuners cost $500 and more on eBay. Why a FM tuner? Well, the station does all the work playing different records or likely CDs. FM does not sound near as good as a record, but for casual listening ok with the right tuner. Many FM tuners do not sound good and distorts the audio. FM station quality audio is not near what was in the 1960s and 1970s. Competition was fierce and stations had audio engineers. Most FM stations were all tube generated audio too. Opti-Mods were carefully adjusted unlike now too. As stated top ten tuners are $500 to $1K- too high cost IMO for FM. However, a few slipped thru the cracks so to speak. A Merdian 504 is in top 14 and we are splitting hairs here. I bought one for $140 but usually cost $200. They are rare though. Cost was $1350 in 1991. The Mitsubishi DA-F20 is a cheap top 10 tuner but failure rates are high- no good.  The sleeper is a Hitachi FT-8000. It was not in the Shootout page but mentioned as better sounding than the stellar Hitachi FT-5500 MKII in Shoutouts 2.0. I owned both Merdian 504 and Hitachi FT-8000 and both are great sounding equal in audio performance. The FT-8000 are not known for failure and cost $150 to $220 on eBay.

jimbennet
cleeds
6,582 posts
 

yogiboy

For clean FM reception you will need a directional FM antenna. I use a directional  in my attic. Manufacturers stopped making them years ago. This Steller Labs 4 element is still available ...

The best antenna really depends on location and it's certainly true that a high-gain, directional antenna often gives the best results. Good FM antennas are still being made and one of the best seems to be this Sky Blue SBFM9. But if neither signal strength nor multipath are issues for you, a simple folded dipole wire antenna may be all you need.

lsvoharry's avatar
lsvoharry
7 posts
 

If you are judging the FM tuner at its best, listening music you should judge it just as you would LPs or CDs.....how realistic and dimensional does it sound.  The old tube FM's from Fisher and the Dyna FM3 from the early '60's are best in that regard, IMO.  I tested many tuners of that day before finding those two.....and I tested again in the '90's against solid state tuners and the Fisher and Dyna still won on "realism" especially if you are sensitive to dimensionality.  I still use both in two systems, and my brother-in-law uses a Fisher in his system.  From a dimensionality standpoint, the only transistor tuner I've heard that has much at all is the Carver FM.

big_greg
6,821 posts
 

I live about 50 miles from most of the broadcast towers in Seattle.  I could only pickup a couple of local stations and maybe others far off, but with a lot of static with all of the different indoor FM antennas I tried.  This worked well for me and I can now pick up sufficiently strong signals from many stations.  I actually bought it to try to pick up HD TV stations, but it wasn't good for that.  Works great for FM reception though.

https://www.channelmaster.com/products/advantage-100-outdoor-tv-antenna-cm-3020

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