Best looking tuner

sony6060

Super Member
Here is my pick.

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Marantz 125 in a walnut cabinet. Really pretty after swapping lamps to blue LEDs.

The 150 must be nice too with its o-scope.
 
No fun, really, looking at "pretty" tuners. It's more entertaining to look at and write about UGLY tuners.

This one is about as ugly as they get. It is so ugly that even though my brother still has one, I didn't want to ruin my camera taking a photo of it. So this photo was saved from a website (alexreeltoreel.com). Even so, the hard drive that I had when I saved it, has crapped out. Think maybe because this thing is so ugly?

It's ugly inside, as well as out.

It sounded...like garbage! That was when you could tune in a station cleanly, which definitely wasn't all the time. Its sensitivity was poor so it had to be used in a high signal-strength location. Mostly that meant a large metropolitan area but along with signal strength in such an area came multipath (the FM signal would reflect off buildings and appear delayed at the receiver). This thing was poor at rejecting weak interfering signals (lousy "capture ratio") and just as bad at rejecting multipath. Selectivity was poor so it had a hard time tuning in a station if there were another one or two broadcast channels adjacent. If there was a strong FM station nearby (where I lived in San Francisco there was a transmitter a half-mile away) it would appear a dozen times across the dial, seemingly right on top of the station you were trying to listen to.

It always seemed to be out-of-alignment. It was even a hot-chassis AC/DC set, like an old AM table radio. All the innards should have been wandering off alignment all the time. So, how did it keep enough alignment to stay in tune with itself? It didn't. It would drift during warmup, drift while temperature was stable, drift if you bumped it, drift if you looked cross-eyed at it. A lot of tuners of the day relied on Automatic Frequency Control (AFC) which would automatically tweak the local oscillator to adjust for drift. But it probably would have cost twice as much to implement as it cost to BUILD this entire tuner.

There would have been no point, anyway. Even if you could get a station past its poor RF/IF stages, the audio sounded...like garbage!

Meet the GRANCO FM TUNER!!!

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I don't feel it gets any better than a Pioneer TX9500 II. I like the Sansui units too, just not as much.
 
The Technics ST-3400 but it looks best when coupled with the Technics SU-3434 Quadraphonic Receiver

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I would no joke sell my sister to get these in mint condition
 
The above-mentioned line of Matsushita/National/Technics/Panasonic consumer electronics equipment was indeed quite clean and attractively styled. I had a Panasonic CB radio back in... well... those days that was extremely attractive (bronze rather than silver face, but somewhat similar cosmetically to the tuner above).
 
This slightly blurred copy from TIC shows the Heathkit AJ-1510A:

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which is one of the best looking that I have. BTW, I do have a Granco, just an uglier one than the one shown above.
 
This slightly blurred copy from TIC shows the Heathkit AJ-1510A:

AJ-1510a.jpg


which is one of the best looking that I have. BTW, I do have a Granco, just an uglier one than the one shown above.

And just like mine, it self-tunes to an impossible frequency. ;) I'll be doing a host of modifications to hopefully fix a lot of those glitches, and replace the 709 opamp in the pulse-counting detector. Sounds quite good when it wants to work properly. Got a Heathkit IO-10 oscilloscope next to it for multipath monitoring.

How many tubes do the Grancos use? I'm suspecting a superregen design here.
 
And just like mine, it self-tunes to an impossible frequency. ;) I'll be doing a host of modifications to hopefully fix a lot of those glitches, and replace the 709 opamp in the pulse-counting detector. Sounds quite good when it wants to work properly. Got a Heathkit IO-10 oscilloscope next to it for multipath monitoring.

I published a list of mods and put it on the yahoo fm tuner group and the diyaudio forum. I don't seem to be able to add the files as attachments, but I will keep trying.
 
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For looks: Close tie between the Marantz 10b and 20b "in" their wood cabinets.

Honorable mention: Sequerra FM-1. I got to "babysit" one for 2 months. It is sexy at night but for me it's "date the Sequerra, marry the Marantz".
 
I published a list of mods and put it on the yahoo fm tuner group and the diyaudio forum. I don't seem to be able to add the files as attachments, but I will keep trying.

Yep, that's the very (valuable!) list of AJ-1510A mods I'm working from. I've tried replacing the 709 with an LM318, but couldn't get that to work. Installed a socket so future mods will be easier. Replacing the multiplex IC with something much more modern would be a chore, probably requiring a daughterboard or a whole new card.

I'll focus on general mods for the time being; I've started by updating the 15 volt supply with new caps and fast recovery rectifiers and a snubber.
 
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