What have I been missing

[swend]

I recently purchased an old but mint Sansui TU-517. I have it playing through an old Mac integrated amp and it is causing me a dilemma. I have a nice new Outlaw RR2150 receiver in my living room as my main music source. But I'm beginning to think that the thirty year old tuner is much better than the digital Outlaw. I never really paid much attention to tuners over my 30 plus years of stereo hobby, I didn't think there was much that could be done with compressed over the air signals. I thought soundstages and positioning instruments was not in the world of FM.
Boy was I wrong. FM sounds great through this tuner. Detailed and rich. I love those late night sessions spinning the dial. So much so I have a 1/2 wave dipole antenna on order and destined for the highest place I can put it on the roof! And I'm thinking about sending the tuner out to be aligned.
Is it that old analog tuners were from a day when FM was more important as a music source. Are analog tuners just better than digital? Have I been missing out for all these years or what.

[Raynald]

Run away before it's too late! Soon you will spending all of your time/money on those "outdated" analog tuners. DO NOT look for help here:

http://www.fmtunerinfo.com/

And yes, generally speaking a lot of folks find analog tuners just sound better, in exactly the ways you described. Just like anything in audio, or life, it is dangerous to generalize too much as there are some excellent sounding digital tuners also, you just have be more selective (was that a pun?). There are also many bad sounding analog tuners.

Enjoy.