On Wed, 10 Sep 2014 08:50:54 +1000, Trevor Wilson
wrote:

On 9/09/2014 3:19 PM, wrote:
" 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.

**As national service manager for Marantz Australia, during the mid-late
1970s, I recieved all the troublesome jobs from all over the nation.
That included a bunch of drifting tuners. They were a colassal PITA.
Sourcing and replacing appropriate caps in FM stages was nonsensically
time-consuming. In one instance, I duplicated the then, new, Model 2600
quartz locking system and installed it into a particularly troublesome
one. Worked a treat and was a quick fix. I was a happy chappy when
Marantz went all digital.


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.

**THAT was my point. I own some VERY fine, VERY expensive old analogue
tuners. The modern, digitally tuned, Denon blows them away. In every
meaningful way.



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 nothing special in the Denon. It is bog-standard stuff, well
executed, with careful attention to detail. The Yamahas and the Marantz,
OTOH, go to heoric lengths (particularly the Marantz 125) to obtain
inferior performance to the much cheaper Denon TU1500.


There is a big difference.


**Yes, there is. Download the service manual for the Marantz 125 and see
what incredible lengths Marantz went to in order to achieve mediocre
performance, compared to the Denon.


There was a huge old Pioneer receiver that came into Best Buy's main
repair center that had tuner drift which previous techs gave up on. I
replaced the npo caps once, and other components, but the drift
continued. I finally found a npo cap that caused the frequency to
drift exactly in the opposite direction at the same temperatures as
the original drift. I played the unit for 2 weeks and shipped it. It
never came back. Chuck