Looking For a Vintage Tuner

lifestyle

lifestyle

Audioholic
Looking to buy a vintage tuner in Pristine, Mint, or New condition. I like the Yamaha's & Kenwood's but am open to any brand. This will be paired-up with a new A-S500 & CD-S300 (Yamaha). Thanks AudioPhiles!! :)
 
Robert Jahnke

Robert Jahnke

Audiophyte
Still looking? I've got a Harman Kardon Citation III tube FM tuner that's been sitting on a shelf for many years now. As a matter of fact it's about to turn 50 next year. I feel a little guilty for not using it but I got remote-control-lazy about 20 years ago. Now you got me to thinking... perhaps I should try to find it a good home.
 
lifestyle

lifestyle

Audioholic
Still looking? I've got a Harman Kardon Citation III tube FM tuner that's been sitting on a shelf for many years now. As a matter of fact it's about to turn 50 next year. I feel a little guilty for not using it but I got remote-control-lazy about 20 years ago. Now you got me to thinking... perhaps I should try to find it a good home.
I have a Yamaha CT-400 & 3 Kenwood KT-5500's now - so I think i'm good for now. Thanks Robert... :)
 
Johnny2Bad

Johnny2Bad

Audioholic Chief
There are a lot of good vintage tuners available from the usual suspects. See if you can find a comprehensive spec sheet on any one you are considering. One "quick and dirty" spec you want to try and find, if you're looking at an analog tuner, is the number of gangs in the tuner; 3 is common, 4 and (rarely) 5 are very good and excellent, respectively.

Analog and Digital, when it comes to tuners, refers to the tuning method used. Digital tuners are quartz-locked to the broadcast frequency and don't drift as the tuner warms up, for example, but if you are trying to listen in a dense broadcast environment (maybe you live in New York, for example) they can lock on the nearby but undesired station. An analog tuner is extremely competent and definitely not second-fiddle to a Digital section, and would allow you to tune in difficult stations. If you live in South Dakota, maybe you don't need to deal with "too many" stations so either will do nicely.

A lot depends on where you live and what is available to you in the way of broadcasters. Most (almost all) reviews and websites are obsessed with dense markets where you have dozens of stations crowding the dial. But that doesn't describe everyone; some listeners have less than 10 stations available to them; in that case overall sound quality is far more important, so try to find that information in a review or forum post if you can.

Finally, the most important part of FM listening: Get a good antenna. A poor tuner with a good antenna will often out-perform a great tuner with a poor antenna. I suggest you budget about $50~100 for a decent antenna; you won't regret it.

Magnum Dynalab ST-2 is a good choice and easy to deal with as far as installation goes; if you have the right home setup you can use a conventional FM antenna mounted in the attic of your home as well.

Avoid any amplified antenna; instead of good reception what you get is added noise plus overloading the input sensitivity of your FM section, which results in very high THD (distortion). Stick with a good basic unamplified antenna and you will be much happier.

Kenwood, Sansui, and Luxman made FM quality a high priority when designing their products and approved of their engineers beating the corporate bean-counters back with a stick. There are a number of good tuners available from others as well, but often it's on a model-by-model basis rather than a corporate priority.

If you spent enough money back in the day, you often got a good performing unit, so premium units high in the model heirachy often perform very well, and in this day of "vintage" audio, a top-of-the-line unit often sells for the same price as a marginal bottom-of-the-line unit, because today's resellers on places like eBay have no idea what they are selling. So don't settle for a tuner that sold for $200 when $1000 MSRP units are listed for the same prices.

Be sure that you are only looking at known good (as in working) units; there are very few audio components that have more capacitors than a tuner; and capacitors do not age well. Ideally you want a unit that was actually used by the previous owner rather than one held in storage, but in today's market that is difficult to find when people replaced their 2-channel gear for multichannel receivers. The tuner went into a box in the attic and that's that. But try to get the seller to confirm it powers up, sounds good, all the switches work without noise, etc.

I would avoid newer tuners made during the 1990's and later (and this includes new-in-box units from your favourite reseller and manufacturer); today you get a very inexpensive Integrated Circuit FM section that is pretty much the same regardless of who makes the unit or even how much it costs. The performance is adequate but no better than adequate.

This leads to the modern music lover thinking that FM is a low-fidelity interface; nothing could be further from the truth. However, since the almighty dollar rules the broadcast industry (AM, Television, Sat, whatever) and in virtually every market there are stations owned by greedy ****'s, you do find stations with very aggressive compression / limiters that rob the music of it's inherent qualities. If you have smaller, independent stations, you might be lucky and find one that does care about Sound Quality ("SQ"), and you will be rewarded with excellent SQ.

Good luck; post back when you choose a solution and let us know what you think.
 
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