[Duncan]

Just picked this up from the local pawn shop today, is 1989ish vintage, and has the normal higher end features including things like hi-blend, and a calibration tone, its digital... so the analogue purists will turn their noses up at it, but I can instantly say that this tuner (that cost from what I understand, about $400 back in the day) is the best that i've ever heard of FM, massively dynamic (compared to 'normal' tuners), great soundstage / seperation, and that Hi-Blend thing works brilliantly for the weaker stations, cleans them up nicely

Now I guess to look out for one of those Sansui TX1s...

 

[PinkFloyd]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duncan Just picked this up from the local pawn shop today, is 1989ish vintage, and has the normal higher end features including things like hi-blend, and a calibration tone, its digital... so the analogue purists will turn their noses up at it, but I can instantly say that this tuner (that cost from what I understand, about $400 back in the day) is the best that i've ever heard of FM, massively dynamic (compared to 'normal' tuners), great soundstage / seperation, and that Hi-Blend thing works brilliantly for the weaker stations, cleans them up nicely Now I guess to look out for one of those Sansui TX1s...

If you see a LEAK Troughline tuner on your travels pick it up for me please!

 

[Glassman]

tell me about it! when I was young I was listening on somewhat younger Esprit tuner, the first with RDS - ST-S570ES.. great sound, but the RDS wasn't working completely right.. but the looks!

here's one selling at eBay right now with lots of pics of it..

 

[Duncan]

Glassman, that looks a fair bit nicer aesthetically than the older brother that I have...

...If it sounded even half as good as this one (although with Sonys prowess with tuners in the early to mid nineties, it probably sounded better) then it was a great unit!

What was wrong with the RDS? a big flaw?

 

[Duncan]

For anyone interested, my model is this one

 

[D-EJ915]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duncan For anyone interested, my model is this one

I think that it's broken somehow and he's suggesting it to somebody who can repair stuff...just wanted to point that out...

anyway, it looks nice duncan

, if there were half-decent radio stations around here, I think there was a sweet tuner from sony on regular ebay a while back that I would've gotten

 

[strohmie]

We need to start a Team Tuner-Fi one of these days. I've been starting to look into them myself recently, as I'm going toward separate components for my home setup. I'll post any findings I have as I have them.

 

[Glassman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duncan For anyone interested, my model is this one

hey! your tuner does DSD, mine didn't! the SQ sure as hell must be brilliant then, just make sure the station plays regular SACD and not just remastered 16/44.1

RDS was working ok for displaying station name and clock, but finding alternative frequencies (AF) didn't work really.. there were some other things it couldn't do that newer devices could, but hey it was the first RDS implementation!

 

[memepool]

Yeah Tuners seem so unfashionable that they are a total sonic bargain if you live anywhere with decent FM. Also worth checking out are the Denon T260L,

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...794054691&rd=1

a classic digital design, and all the NAD stuff both analogue and digital.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...792594179&rd=1

None of these were that expensive at the time but they performed well beyond their price level and were common so are therefore now very cheap. 10-50UKP.

The Leak Troughline II or III are the most hyped. The II has cool 50's lines and the III is grey and black leatherette.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...sPageName=WDVW

But you need to either know your way around the insides of a valve/tube unit or spend quite a bit on re-aligning and modding it with offboard stereo-decoders etc. Also you need a serious roof antena as it isn't very sensitive.
So it's only for the collector / true tuner hardcore. That said it's reveered in the UK anyway as the finest tuner ever built.

 

[Duncan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Glassman hey! your tuner does DSD, mine didn't! the SQ sure as hell must be brilliant then, just make sure the station plays regular SACD and not just remastered 16/44.1

I've been trying to find out what the DSD circuit does... obviously with DSD being for SACD etc, google searches are seemingly very misleading...

What is your take on it Glassman? (Sorry, probably being thick I know lol!)

[Edit]

Seeing that the definition of DSD is:

Direct Stream
D i g i t a l™ ( D S D™) 1-bit
representation of the
audio waveform with
2.8224 MHz sampling
achieves sound quality
unprecedented in
analog or digital audio.

I'm guessing that the digital tuner feed (is there an ADC in digital tuners??) goes in to the DSD circuit and then converted to analogue there... thats pretty cool for an old unit... unless there is more than one term 'DSD'?

 

[sgrossklass]

Prolly DSD != DSD here. "Digital" demod circuits weren't too uncommon back then, now if I just remembered what was hiding behind these (the "direct comparator" lettering on the Sony may be a hint), and who else used 'em... Guess I've been in headphones for too long

. (Ah well, the guys on FMtuners should know.) The ST-S530ES may have been the little brother of the ST-S730ES, a tuner that is great as long as it's in perfect alignment - which unfortunately it rarely is for very long due to insufficient temperature compensation.

Anyway, I agree that you can get a lot of tuner for relatively little money these days, less so in the states but definitely in ol' Europe. I'm quite happy with my T7500. I recently compared recordings done with the Onkyo a few months back to newer ones from the Grundig and found a slightly lighter sound with a bit less bass in comparison, just like the reviews of the Onkyo had stated. That Grundig is a real nice piece of kit, maybe not with the greatest front-end and selectivity, but certainly a good compromise for someone primarily intending to listen to stronger stations instead of chasing weak DX (however, it does achieve fairly steep filter skirts with its 4 cascaded ceramic filters, it's just that these are wide 280 kHz types). It does a better job keeping the stronger station I usually listen to clean (there's a weaker one 200 kHz below that would introduce some noises on the Onkyo).

 

[Duncan]

Thanks for the info sgrossklass

It certainly does look like there was a bigger brother to this unit, having opened it up, there is about 1/4 of the PCB that has tracings, but not populated

A question from me, being very naive... the unit only has an 75ohm aerial jack, and I only have an 300ohm aerial... I can pull in the local / powerful stations pretty well, but would an 75ohm aerial help me to pull in weaker ones?

Thanks

 

[sgrossklass]

Actually, what you need is a balun to get from a 300 ohm balanced to a 75 ohm unbalanced signal. This page may not be the worst place to start:
http://users.tns.net/~bb/balun.htm

 

[Rob N]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PinkFloyd If you see a LEAK Troughline tuner on your travels pick it up for me please!

If you picked one up from a pawn shop it would probably need re-aligning and/or rebuilding.If it had the original stereo decoder fitted that would also need replacing as it's the weak link in the Troughline