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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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Radio Road Which tuner to get and getting the most from it. Thank God, for the radio! |
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In Reply to: solid vintage fm tuner that's easy to recap / restore ? posted by squiffles on July 24, 2010 at 19:22:04:
Be prepared to have a few suggest tube type tuners. As for SS analog type, I have little experience with tuners in that period except some Marantz receivers that were sonically just ok, not impressive.
Anyways, I owned at least fifteen tuners & kept a few. My focus was on tube type middle priced units. The best factory stock tuner I own is the Fisher KM60 after some tube rolling. What I like about the KM60 is the simplicity of the design, yet enough RF/IF stages to be sensitive & reasonably selective. The 12AX7 audio output tube was changed to a Brimar CV4004 for a rather large improvement in the sonics. Further improvements included new coupling capacitors.
Best sounding tube tuner I owned after capacitor upgrades, changing the 12AU7 audio tube to a E80CC & tube rolling is EICO Classic 2200 with a slight edge (perhaps personal) over the Fisher. The EICO 2200 in stock form is not as good sounding as a Fisher KM60 until modified. Some EICO 1963 & all 1964 tuners have different manufacture of coupling capacitors for superior sonics vs earlier units thus closing the gap on the Fisher KM60. The EICO 2200 are rather rare whereas the Fisher KM60 is easy to source.
As for solid-state, the best factory stock tuner I ow is a synthesized Rotel RT-950BX. (The Rotel just kills a Pioneer F90 rated with great sonics at a well known tuner site- go figure). The Rotel multiplexer operates much quieter than the tube units & is no surprise in that category. I suspect any RT-940 thru RT-950 series are equal performers, but have not heard the other Rotel models in that era.
The Rotel RT-950BX will perform with full quieting (superior signal to noise) on weaker FM stations vs the tube tuners on same FM stations with background hiss. A directional antenna will eliminate this to a large degree. The Rotel bass is as good as the fore-mentioned Fisher & EICO tuners, midrange is a little more forward and slightly less detailed- both acceptable to my ears. However, the high frequencies are not as good as the tube tuners in that details are not present. I want to hear a cymbal brush in detail vs just a 'shish' sound. This may be improved by changing the audio coupling & audio output bandpass capacitors.
The tube tuners I own fall apart on FM stations in stereo mode that have digitized signals. The Rotel is uneffected with good bandpass filtering & by design of the Pioneer F90 multiplexer impossible to have an issue. Many SS tuners do have immunity to digitized FM stations. I would be intertested if the high-end tube tuners such as McIntosh MR-67 or MR-71 have immunity to digitized FM stations.
The only real problem with the Rotel is it is ugly like most synthesized tuners.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Tube Tuners vs better synthesized...... - Neff 07/29/1008:13:19 07/29/10 (0)
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