The best sounding FM Tuner is.....

About Sean's post up there... I agree with everything. And also: "fm tuner info" is one of the great white elephant websites of all time. I like Kenwood tuners, but there are plenty of good tuners out there, and if you look at the site, what you slowly start to realize is it's a self-justification for using old Kenwoods. Furthermore there is no baseline for quantitative vs. qualitative measurement, and very little actual evidence from oscilliscopes that any of what they are saying bears any relation to reality. All ceramic filters are better than IR's. No explanation. Modded tuners are always "better". Better sounding or better engineering tested? Again no answer. Wide bands are always better than narrow. Ridiculous. Then people start quoting these lunatics on ebay or over on the asylum and start flame wars over it. It's driven some things through the roof that, frankly, suck, while other great lower-priced-initially tuners languish. That site, TNT audio, which gets a lot of tech stuff plain old wrong (like ultralinear is always push-pull and triode is always single-ended; even in the same amp ...eh... wtf?) and also Arthur Salvatore's site about how Michael Fremer is defrauding people (which may be true, but the way he goes about relating his story is on the level of, I was abducted by aliens!) ...anyway, it all made me start a thread called: Do you believe everything you read on the internet? Audio is like everything else. Some people know what they are talking about, and some people don't. Being able to put up a webpage doesn't make you competent.

My post was for Sean. No; I didn't just scan the FM Tuner Info site. It seems to have more or less spawned out of a local radio club's tuner shootouts, and the guys as well as the tuners are the same vintage. Baselines are biased, when they appear, and the guys who run it all use more or less the same equipment (Kenwood), except for the one off-center guy who uses a *gasp* Sansui. FYI- I actually use a Kenwood tuner, but I don't think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, which is my point: Accuphase, Sansui, Sony and several others all made great tuners you can pick up for around $60 now, that sound as good as many things that are hundreds of dollars more.

I didn't say that spec's don't effect things, but then again spec's aren't everything. None of the major designers lists whether they are using Rhodium plated connectors, what their topology is, how they wind their transformers and out of what (or if they buy them wholesale from others), if they use silver wire, what kind of capacitor construction they believe in, how many gangs and why, what kind of filters... so basically spec's can mean whatever you want them to, based on how you measure them. Fm Tuner Info though "has the answers" on "what's best" in the tuner world. Which is almost always a heads up that you are dealing with either an idiot or a zealot. Saying it sounds "good" to you based on some meaningless baseline is neither engineering or science. It also has nothing to do with applied audio theory. Does anyone really believe that a 500w receiver from Best Buy is a true 500w and sounds better than a 20w tube amp? And anyway, what kind of 500w? Class A, AB or D? Am I supposed to be impressed? Because I'm not.

And this is generally how I feel about sites like FM Tuner Info. The Vintage Knob I like, and to me is more just historical. For instance someone made a key statement above: the Marantz 10B "can be" one of the best tuners out there when aligned correctly, etc. Well of course it can: it has one of the biggest plates around, the 805 tube, and so by virtue of electric theory it must be one of the most sensitive and widest in audio bandwidth. But not acccording to FM Tuner Info. Not the MR71 either. They found both "flabby" and "grainy". Well... you can pretty much stop right there, can't you? Because either they don't know how to properly align a tuner, they don't know how or when to change a tube, or they're deaf. I'm not a "the-more-expensive-it-is, the better it is" guy, but those two tuners are top notch.

One of the reasons I like 6 Moons even though many of their reviewers are about 180 degrees from where I am on the audiophile spectrum is they actually tell you what kind of music they like, the dB level they play it at, and what their favorite components and room treatments are, and how long they have had them. You can kind of relate to someone then, even if you wouldn't want their system. "I put it on my oscilliscope in my basement" and it "sounds good" isn't good enough... ...I mean seriously... ...would you buy a car from a guy who told you he had turned it on and it came on ok, so he's sure it "runs good"? I think not.

I'm lucky enough right now to live in an area with 2 college radio stations, plus several local owned majors and a jazz station. It's a good deal; I had posted a thread trying to get someone to chime in with a farthest signal acquired (I'm leaving the area). Corporate radio is just such a cash cow, and now with HD you can't even mod a really good tuner anymore without getting digital garble in the spectrum... I had been reading something in Scientific American a few years ago about how the electromagnetic spectrum is a natural resource like any other, and it's becoming depleted by the FCC with no oversite accept corporate lobbyists. It really is grim, especially when you look at astro research and because of cellphones and satellite phones it's impossible to recieve and degauss effectively many of the smallest kinds of radio signals. Look at the trouble SETI@HOME has been having with their mathematical breakdowns. Now that it's down to, "Hey, why does it sound like I have Star Wars sound effects in the background on my favorite station?" and "My cell calls are being dropped all the time...", people are starting to notice. But like so many other things with those in power telling you "the jury's still out", it's probably already too late.

Well, Sedond, I guess you proved me wrong: some people DO believe everything they read on the internet.