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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: Good Budget Tuner? posted by JarrettH on December 29, 2007 at 17:00:00:
You do not mention a budget limt but as you mention the T61 assume something around there is the upper limit.
I agree with Jay on all his listed. The Sherwood tube units for the total investment of purchase price and to bring it into spec is a real bargain. The company unlike others started with a rock solid design and over the years continued to improve it rather than doing multiple designs. The mono S3000 and the last stereo S3000IV easily show their relationship. No, they are not sonically equiv to a 10b but, on a decent station they keep up with almost everything in terms of listening and detail.
Little noticed though, is their ss tuners. The company was a pioneer in multiplex and their equipment was used in the first stereo transmissions so they knew FM and stereo. When SS came out many of the companies were early adoptors. Sadly, these early units were fraught with probelms from overload to germanium transistors that simply did not have a long life. Sherwood waited and tred slowly into the SS world. Their engineers continued to improve their tube tuners while the others were burning their tube blueprints. However the engineers were not asleep and were doing the same thing they did with their tube design. They designed a rock stable simple great circuit using the FET and silicon transistors and were the first to introduce the all silicon transistor tuner, amp and receiver. Like the tube tuner, the SS tuner was continued to be improved on as long as they had US design and production. The design went through a few changes including a chenge to microcircuits and improved through the much loved SEL series, the SEL200 receiver and SEL300 tuner.
The S3300 does not get much notice and hence like their tube tuners is undervalued and a real bargain. I picked up mine for less than $50 on eBay and had than $125 into it with a complete going over and alignment. The tech who worked on it told me he was amazed how sensitive it is. I've been running it with the mathcing S9500c integrated amp on my Bozaks and it is really a music person's tuner. I've not directly compared it to my Mc MR77 or Philips 6731 tuners but it has ben because I've just been entralled with the voicing. If looking for maybe the best bang for the buck and could care less about the snob points, I'd suggest the S3300. Mine is the later version using the microcircuits. The later SEL-300 tuner, the last of their US produced tuners uses the same circuits but has an additional filter pack. The SEL-300 is also undervalued but sells for a premium compared to the S3300.
On the other end of the spectrum for my inventroy is the Philips 6731 fm-am tuner. I got mine before knowing about the TIC review and on early testing realized I had stumbled on a real gem. This is DX'ing tuner withough giving up any of the sound unlike what happened when the took the Mc MR77 and decided to convert it to a DX'er and compromised the sound quality to do so. The sound of the Philips slightly less or better than the 77 depending on if you like the sound of the Mc. It took some time to tell the differences. Quieting is faster, more selective, better separation and better pulling power. The kicker is that Philips (well, actually Magnavox)decided to counter the trend of throwing in a poor AM tuner and went all out to make an excellent AM tuner. It is so good and Philips capitalized on it in their literature by discussing the AM first and giving it more space. It is so good that for the first time I have an AM tuner in my system. If I did not have the MR77, I'd never miss it and in my system I'd estimate that my FM listening is pretty much evenly split between the 6731 and the 77, though for the past couple of months I've been listeing to the Sherwood almost exclusively.
With both these tuners, the associated amps and in the case of the Philips, the associated preamps are nthign to sneeze and and worth considering also.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Good Budget Tuner? - Brian Levy 12/30/0712:55:04 12/30/07 (0)
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