Whats the best used tuner for under 1000

Wow. There is certainly a lot of bad information floating around on Audiogon. Suffice to say that most of the Magnums are garbage. The MD-90 is nothing short of a joke that any informed consumer would laugh off the showroom floor. I'd love to post a diatribe here regarding which tuner is best for which purpose, but that discussion has already been done. Stop over at the FMTuners Yahoo Group for much of that. Here I'll just provide a brief laundry list.

In short, Almost none of the usual audiophile approved brands are going to be any good in the area of tuners, apart from the audio section. FM design is something which baffles most of them, and is not their area of expertise. So, even if you feed the best audio section in the world with junk, you still get junk. The GIGO principle at work.

Vintage analog tuners can potentially be good, but their primary strength is limited to RF performance, where some were truly excellent, although that number is still quite small. All other areas, such as the FM detector and the stereo decoder have been surpassed by leaps and bounds by modern units which are available for less money. At one point, I was also firmly on the analog tuner bandwagon which many still advocate. I'm now firmly off it after more experience with new tuners. Unfortunately, the desirable ones, while remaining inexpensive, are often difficult to find. Many modern tuners are junk compared to vintage analog units.

Here is a short list: Onkyo T-9090II if selectivity is your thing. Also pretty good all around. Denon TU-800, which was a genuinely good all around tuner. Yamaha TX-1000, T-85, T-950, T-930, T-900 are all decent tuners with various strengths. None is really head and shoulders above the others. Tandberg 3001 was perhaps the best tuner when it came out, and remained so throughout its 20 year production history. This was a $4000 tuner by the time it was discontinued in the late 90s. Kenwood had the L-1000T and the KT-3300D, both of which were apparently quite similar and arguably among the very best tuners ever designed from a technical standpoint. Pioneer had the F-90 and F-99X, which are identical, and are out there for about $100 or less used, which is a steal. Stereo separation and distortion on these units are actually BETTER than the Accuphase T-109, which is strong evidence of remarkably good engineering and design choices. Sony had a number of good tuners in the ES line, the ST-S730ES, ST-S707ES, and ST-SA5ES, although the ST-S730 was probably the best of the bunch. Audiolab had the 8000T, which was somewhat decent, and Sumo the Charlie. Harmon Kardon had the Citation 23, which was a decent tuner. Sansui had the TU-D99X, X701 and X711, and Hitachi the FT-5500. Finally, we have Rotel with the RT-990BX and RHT-10, which might just make the $1000 mark if you find one. This is your under $1000 and decent digital list and is fairly complete.

In the vintage tuner arena, there are many opinions, with many tuners of various qualities. The Macs were never respected for particularly good sound, but a Rich Modafferi upgrade should take care of a lot of thisl. Kenwood had the KT-917, which isn't cheap, but is very very good if overload is a problem. Pioneer had the F-28 and F-26, which were their best models. Sansui had the TU-919 which might be decent, and the relatively good TU-X1. I personally think vintage Sansuis are sickeningly overpriced. Mitsubishi had the DA-F20, Nikko the Gamma I and Gamma V, Yamaha the T-2 and CT-7000, Sherwood the Micro/CPU 100, with a few decent offerings from other manufacturers which I've left out.

If sound quality is the name of the game, a top modern tuner is probably the way to go. In an urban environment, overload may or may not be a problem, depending on what the strongest signal in the area is. If overload is a huge problem, nothing tops the Technics ST-9030. Selectivity is always a battle, but it also usually wreaks havoc on sound quality. Around New York, switchable IF bandwidths are a MUST. If you're willing to go to $1000, any of the above would serve as a top notch tuner. As always, the best recommendation is to save a little on the tuner, and spend what you saved on a roof mounted antenna with a rotator.

I'm not saying that they are bad tuner, but only that you don't get your money's worth in terms of what is inside the thing. According to the company's own literature the MD-90 employs only THREE tuned stages in the front end. Most decent tuners have at least five. Three, in fact, is the bare minimum to even make reception work. Furthermore, it employes a "variable blend" circuit to reduce noise, which suggests that it uses a chip originally designed for car radios, not high end tuners. The stereo THD is terrible, as is the lower -3dB response, not to mention the stereo separation. Bass will be noticeably weak, if their specifications are to be believed. That's the cheap Magnum though, if you call a thousand bucks for a tuner about as good as the one in my car stereo "cheap."

Ah, but wait, the MD-101A which you recommend has the same specifications across the board, which likely means that the MD-90 is little more than a cosmetic retouching. The 75dB Image rejection specification bolsters my claim that this is actually a very bad tuner, audio stage notwithstanding. Not just bad, but terrible by a high end tuner standard. However, it might sound decent on the stations it actually manages to pick up decently due to the apparently large attention given to the audio stage, where most tuners fall short. Only when we work our way up to the $2500 MD-102 do we get to anything resembling decent tuner performance.

Magnums are good looking high end approved tuners, but anything but their top two offerings are little more than car radio junk stuffed into a nice chassis with what claims to be a decent audio stage. In fact, many car radios are certainly better as tuners. Magnum's top two seem to be fairly decent, the MD-108 especially.

For comparisons sake, my Sony ST-S730ES sports 125dB Image Rejection, 125dB Spurious Response, .007% Stereo THD and IM(measured), 92dB Stereo S/N ratio, 70dB Stereo Separation at 1kHz. You get the idea. As a tuner, it is much better than the Magnum. Sonically, it will provide better sound on a greater number of stations, this being an objective statements based on actual tuner performance. However, it is possible that the Magnum might sound better on a limited number of stations which are received properly by the very bad tuner in the Magnum.

By the way Charles, how many high end tuners have you actually used besides your Magnum? I've used well over twenty in the last year alone, probably more. More experience might lead you to throw that Magnum out the window once you can get past the cosmetics and the name.

Ryan

Sure. This will be long, because I'm going to explain how tuners work, which is the first step toward understanding why specifications do, in fact, matter to a larger extent with tuners than with other audio products. Tuners are different from most audio devices in that they not only have to pass an audio signal, but they have to produce the audio signal as well, and in so doing, have to pick that signal out from many other competing signals.

A tuner's front end can only handle so much signal, so if one lives in an area with many strong competing signals, its ability to handle them becomes very important. I know the specs on the Perreaux, and it would be unusable on many stations where I live. When a front end overloads, images of the overly strong station can appear all over the dial, or interfere with the reception of other stations. Basically, you're trying to dump a five gallon bucket of water into a milk jug. In my area, 102.9 and 103.5 will overload many tuners, producing a mixed image at 102.3, either blotting it out or making it unlistenable. A comprehensive set of numbers can help to identify whether this will be a problem with a given tuner.

Assuming we manage to receive the station we're after, we mix that frequency with another frequency to arrive at 10.7MHz, which is where it needs to be to be filtered in the IF stage. This is usually done by a ceramic filter. Remembering that FM works by deviating a signal from a center frequency, we obviously want to get as much of that signal as possible. Remember, however, that there may be another station right next to the one we want. So, a tuners selectivity comes into account. Too much and you're losing a lot of the information a station is putting out. Too little and you'll get interference from stations surrounding it. The best compromise is to have more than one filter width, ie, selectable IF bandwidths. All filters have characteristics as well, and will alter the signal to some extent. Obviously, we want as little alteration of the signal as possible, in addition to getting as much of it as possible.

Perhaps you're now starting to see a number of the problems involved. At this point, we're not even dealing with turning this signal into the stereo audio signal you hear. Skipping over the detector, we'll skip ahead to the multiplex stage. The multiplex is responsible for taking the composite signal out of the detector and splitting it into left and right audio channels. What we have, essentially, in a primary mono channel with encoded left and right information. Doing this stage right is not easy either, and many tuners do it very badly. Anyhow, once out of this stage, we're finally ready for the audio stage. Actually, in many tuners that aren't state of the art, there are still a few more filters and various traps in here.. NOW we're ready for the audio stage, where your typical audiophile company finally has a clue.

Incidentally, this is only the tip of the iceberg, and scarecely brushed the surface of the complexity of what actually has to go one to do this as well as possible.

Various specifications, once understood, will tell you how well each of these stages is designed and is doing its job. In my experience, this is almost always audible with enough tuner listening experience. Obviously, we should desire these stages to be as good as possible without sacrificing audio performance.

There is one more thing to keep in mind: Your fidelity isn't going to get any better than that of the broadcasting station, which is often quite bad with large amounts of compression and the like. One of my longstanding hypotheses is that many audiophiles like tuners that don't have great fidelity. They like tuners that mask much of the junk on lesser stations and make them listenable, not understanding that some stations actually should sound terrible. Magnum's tuners such as the MD-90 have -3dB points which are awful next to what is actually possible. However, by rolling off the edges they cover up not only the station's deficiencies, but the numerous problems in the previous stages of the tuner as well.

Unfortunately, on a great classical or jazz station that isn't compressing and actually pays attention to fidelity, the tuner will never sound as good as a tuner that sounds terrible on those overly compressed commercial stations.

There's actually a picture of a Perreaux TU3 on eBay right now with the lid off. It has a couple of audiophile grade capacitors in it, a nice power supply, and that's it. Everything before that stage stinks, and is little more than a car radio, and an old one at that. Perreaux, being an audiophile company, did what they knew, and left the rest of the tuner to car radio chip manufacturers. Magnum is now following a similar approach in all but their very best tuners.