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Magnum Dynalab Owners Thread

MiamiEd said:
What tuner and antenna are you using?

By the way, welcome to Audiokarma.

Ed
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Thanks. I still have my old FT101. I was thinking unsourced upgrading recently to a 90T and the google brought me here. Glad to see there is still some interest in good quality radio!
 
Faint&fuzzy said:
Thanks. I still have my old FT101. I was thinking unsourced upgrading recently to a 90T and the google brought me here. Glad to see there is still some interest in good quality radio!
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I have both the FT-11 and FT-101. I enjoy them both. The FT-101 is downstairs in my main system. The FT-11 is upstairs in my second system. In this time of social distancing, both have given me untold hours of happy listening.

Both tuners have their limitations, like any electronics. The 101’s signal strength meter does not work. The 11’s meters are also out of commission, it is a bit drifty and sensitive to heat, no doubt due to old caps in the VFO. They both shine in sound quality though.

I do lust after the more expensive MD products, particularly the FT109, but these would be overkill for me. As a tube fan, the 90T would be very interesting to me too. Let us know if you take the plunge.
 
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hey all, regarding the FT-101 i noticed that when i recapped mine i missed a couple caps, and what look like maybe ceramic resistors(?) across the low output jacks. the caps are 10uF/50V do these affect sound quality? easy enough to replace/upgrade....thanks in advance!

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I picked up a FT-11 yesterday and am going through it. Tuning is a little wonky and the tuning meter appears stuck as is commonly reported. I'm wondering whether it would be a good investment to send it in.
 
ET16 said:
I picked up a FT-11 yesterday and am going through it. Tuning is a little wonky and the tuning meter appears stuck as is commonly reported. I'm wondering whether it would be a good investment to send it in.
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I use my FT-11 daily. It has great audio and gives me hours of fatigue free listening. I had to work on it for a while to fix tuning issues etc. Cleaning the contacts for the front panel switches made a world of difference. While my meters do not work either, I tune by ear in order to listen to the two stations that I like down on the low end of the band.


I can live with this although I am sure that I would enjoy the radio more after MD went through it. I think that their service is very reasonable. If you are planning to keep it, I would say do it.

Enjoy.
 
Cleaning the switches also seems to have helped mine. I took the meter apart and sprayed it with contact cleaner, but have not seen any improvement.
 
I think the meter issue may be with the circuit and not the meter itself. I get 100 mV or more on the working meter and under 10 on the non-working one.
 
ET16 said:
I think the meter issue may be with the circuit and not the meter itself. I get 100 mV or more on the working meter and under 10 on the non-working one.
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That is a significant difference. As you know, these meters are notorious for freezing.
 
The meters on my Etude were frozen for years. Never gave them much attention but one day with not much to do I decided to investigate. They are easy to unmount and easy to open up. Using a hypodermic oiler I put the smallest drop of machine oil on the movement and exercised the pointer back and forth. Worked perfect.
I’m sure the outstanding performance didn’t get any better!
 
I had one of these until it got stolen from our home in 1987 -- With only a couple of hours on it. The "shocking" thing was the way the thief went about stealing this and the other four pieces of similarly high-end equipment which were stacked on the fireplace mantle.

The thief grabbed a kitchen knife and cut off all of the AC cords just a few inches away from where they enter each unit. They were all plugged into a power strip which could've easily been switched off or unplugged, but for some reason the thief chose to cut through the power cords -- the first one being live. That scenario was pretty obvious from the appearance of the blade edge on the kitchen knife found nearby. Somebody did some brief arc welding. Obviously the first cord he (okay, in all fairness it could be a "she") cut through tripped the circuit breaker. Then "they" just cut the rest of the AC cords and took the whole stack.

Almost 35 years later I'm still wondering what kind of person would steal high-end equipment by cutting the power cords as if they were hold-down ropes?!! Not only would it makes it all but obvious to anyone that the equipment was stolen, but it would cost a lot of money to make them worth anything -- and what would a shop think if someone brought them a stack of equipment with the cords cut off. You have to wonder how many hands that equipment went through -- and whether it ended up in the dumpster or eventually landed in the hands of someone who could begin to appreciate what they had. I never knew what to make of it.

The other day I saw an FT101 for sale and thought how much I would enjoy having another. This unit has the digital display locked on the display of one frequency -- while the FT-101 tuner Section otherwise works properly. Is this a common failure? I'm an EE and would be able to understand how the digital readout is derived from the analog tuning circuits -- but I don't have any documentation to consider whether this is a mechanical problem or a digital counter problem or even worth the effort to mess with. I just remembered that I really liked that tuner.

Grateful for any comments.
 
CoastinHome said:
Almost 35 years later I'm still wondering what kind of person would steal high-end equipment by cutting the power cords as if they were hold-down ropes?!!

Grateful for any comments.
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A stupid, ignorant idiot with no common sense!....first for being a thief and second for being just plain stupid...not knowing any better.

Unfortunately these types of low life individuals are everywhere.
 
I had an interesting experience with Magnum Dynalab yesterday that I thought I'd share.

I called them, as I was ready to send my FT-11 in for repair. In talking with the fellow on the phone, I mentioned that I was also thinking about their trade in program.

For the FT-11, he strongly recommended I upgrade. He said that the FT-11, if they repaired it, would probably need to be repaired again in the future.

I decided to get a FT-101 instead.
 
ET16 said:
I had an interesting experience with Magnum Dynalab yesterday that I thought I'd share.

I called them, as I was ready to send my FT-11 in for repair. In talking with the fellow on the phone, I mentioned that I was also thinking about their trade in program.

For the FT-11, he strongly recommended I upgrade. He said that the FT-11, if they repaired it, would probably need to be repaired again in the future.

I decided to get a FT-101 instead.
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That was probably the correct decision. I bought a FT-11 in 2000 and enjoyed it for about 13 years, when it started to drift so much that it became unusable. I sent it in to MD for repairs and it worked OK for about 4 months but then drifted and became unusable again. I gave up on it and bought a Squeezbox that I didn't find very satisfying.
 
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