"
A lot of people agree with you.


**There are a lot of idiots out there too. "

Well at least you put the too on the end.

"**Yep. Some were very good. Some were crap. They drifted off station and
offered poor specs compared to many modern tuners. In terms of cost, the
modern tuners beat the pants off the old ones. "

Wait, we are not talking form the 1960s here. these htings were pretty refined. Even back then they had an adapted quartz lock instead of AFC to permanently ban drift. Plus, they generally knew what they were doing about thermal drift. I've had plenty of 1970s tuners and almost never had a problem with drift.

Tuners underwent a change around then from a narrow band detector and a wide band IF to wider band detector and a narrower, or at least better slopd IF. those ceramic filters were coing into vogue. Fact is, even though they did improve performance, they saved the manufacturers money.

"**Again: Very much a generalisation. When a company like Denon decides
to build a modern, good quality tuner, it can do so at reasonable cost
and offer very high levels of performance. "

You are talking about Denon here. You listed some good tuners you had. Those are not quite average.

But I'll tell you what RALLY beats the pants off the old tuners - manufacturing cost. I got a Technics which I consider half decent. It is standalone digital, actually has an AC outlet on the back. I forgot the model right now but the rated sensitivity is 0.9 uV. Not THAT tuner picks up as wlel as these old ones.

Thing about specs on things like this is the rule is to meet or exceed. If they rat the sensitivity at 1.5 uV and you test it and find it is 1.2 uV, you going to call them and complain ? "Sure Mr. ****ing add whatver adjective here, we'll send you out one that isn't as good right away".

With the techniques of the day, though they could get damn good performance, they could not always guarantee it. How many units did Hifi mag test that were more power, lower distortion and better FM than the manufacturer claimed ? Quite a few. Not all actually, but for a unit not to meet its rated specs was like a judge getting overturned by a higher court. Looks very bad and demands a response.

Does anyone test this stuff these days ?

But anyway, with the modern methods, you are not going to have all that many units exceeding specs by much. they are already too close to perfection, like in the IF filtrs, the digital detectors and all that.

A good analogy would be amps. Amps, including those in recievers could usually be expected to produce like 40 % mmore power than their rating. Some were almost double, but that was kinda rare. (actually a newer line of Protonss or something did that but they were junkbecause they were underbuilt)

Anyway, with modern transistors and/or ICs, they got perfect linearity to the rails. In the old days with the older circuitry they had a hard time keeping it linear all the way, so the outputs needed a littl headroom in the voltage department. You could crank them quite a bit higher, and if you were into loud that was good. Less clipping.

However you might be listening to say 2 % THD, below the clipping but more than the rated THD. Many people cannot har 2 %, and many speakers are ovr 2 % at higher listening levels.

Now look, I am not talking $30,000 systems here, I am talking good quaality but cheap enought that people will buy.

You go in there with say $800 for a new stereo, that includes at least reciever amd speakers or tuner and amp and speakers. I think what you could get in 1975 for that money was better than now.

A realy good modern tuner ? Luxman ? Hafler ? Sure. Except I don't listen to the radio. All my music is on the computer. Ha, now that I think of it there is this Iheartradio on the nett I guess I can listen to the radio on, so, I dunno.

So yeah, they got better specs but only because they can guarantee them. but the fact is that the FETs in the front end have not improved all thatt much - except in noise. tha tis a factor about where you can put it in the circuit. Right in front ? you need the very best ones. On a manufacturing level at any given price you can get a certain guaranteed noise figure. We ight be talkng a dollar. That is alot for one part. Now an equivalnt is just pennies. The whole front end for most of this stuff iss probably three bucks outtaa China. Just program something to tell it what to tune and the IF is yours.

When you talk the tuners you've had, the more modern ones, those are probably meticulously designed, the front end designed in house, **** like that. Not much off the shelf.

There is a big difference.