Dclapp
Active Member
Cross posted by request from general audio..
I have loved radios all my long life and now also collect vintage Pioneers, Marantzs and Sansuis -- some of which actually work! And quite a few very good tuners, SS and tube, also.
My living room TV amp is a newer 7.1 Sony ES; a nice unit feeding excellent vintage speakers.
And my current favorite shortwave radio is a Tecsun PL-390, a marvelous (small!) AM/FM/LW wonder.
Sadly, my favorite FM station is a low-power college jazz station at 88.5 FM...at the bottom of the dial. And none of my tuners do a magnificent job of tuning it in with my various indoor FM antennas (and I live in the city, so this isn't a huge geographic stretch). The better tuners do a better job, of course.
So then, just for grins, I plugged the Tecsun into AUX (from the headphone jack on the Tecsun) and listened to it through a good amp and good speakers. IT WAS GREAT! Really. And not just at pulling in the station, which it was. The dynamic range was also better than any other tuner I own. Bass was excellent; I expected it to roll off. It didn't. Strong, linear and rock solid all the way down. Mids, high...tremendous. All this in a $60 piece of plastic the size of three packs of cigarettes side-by-side. I know that there's a "radio on a chip" in there, and a DSP and that it was designed by some (I've proven, to me, anyway) great engineers in Palo Alto (But Made in China, natch).
I know most of the Audio Holy Words and I did not hear anything "veiled" and the background silence was "inky black" (one of my favorite descriptors
and all that; also not fatiguing to listen to. You get the idea. If we had been doing a A/B test and I said: "Now I'll switch to my mega-bucks, silver-wired washed-in-unicorn tears" tuner, you'd have said after listening, I'm sure..."Oh Yeah!!"
What does this mean? That I'm full of it? I don't think so, though I wondered myself and put it through the paces as well as I could. I think the moral is that what was hard in the 1950s-1980s isn't hard to do anymore, given today's technology combined with Big Brains like Nelson Pass and other luminaries and the unnamed engineers behind this particular Tecsun.
Go read the reviews on Amazon or, better, eHam. It is held in high regard, though most reviewers aren't "sound quality" obsessed.
Thought you'd enjoy knowing. Let the flames begin, Brothers! (And I have no interest in the company, although I would accept a large share in the company in return for this post
doug
I have loved radios all my long life and now also collect vintage Pioneers, Marantzs and Sansuis -- some of which actually work! And quite a few very good tuners, SS and tube, also.
My living room TV amp is a newer 7.1 Sony ES; a nice unit feeding excellent vintage speakers.
And my current favorite shortwave radio is a Tecsun PL-390, a marvelous (small!) AM/FM/LW wonder.
Sadly, my favorite FM station is a low-power college jazz station at 88.5 FM...at the bottom of the dial. And none of my tuners do a magnificent job of tuning it in with my various indoor FM antennas (and I live in the city, so this isn't a huge geographic stretch). The better tuners do a better job, of course.
So then, just for grins, I plugged the Tecsun into AUX (from the headphone jack on the Tecsun) and listened to it through a good amp and good speakers. IT WAS GREAT! Really. And not just at pulling in the station, which it was. The dynamic range was also better than any other tuner I own. Bass was excellent; I expected it to roll off. It didn't. Strong, linear and rock solid all the way down. Mids, high...tremendous. All this in a $60 piece of plastic the size of three packs of cigarettes side-by-side. I know that there's a "radio on a chip" in there, and a DSP and that it was designed by some (I've proven, to me, anyway) great engineers in Palo Alto (But Made in China, natch).
I know most of the Audio Holy Words and I did not hear anything "veiled" and the background silence was "inky black" (one of my favorite descriptors
and all that; also not fatiguing to listen to. You get the idea. If we had been doing a A/B test and I said: "Now I'll switch to my mega-bucks, silver-wired washed-in-unicorn tears" tuner, you'd have said after listening, I'm sure..."Oh Yeah!!"What does this mean? That I'm full of it? I don't think so, though I wondered myself and put it through the paces as well as I could. I think the moral is that what was hard in the 1950s-1980s isn't hard to do anymore, given today's technology combined with Big Brains like Nelson Pass and other luminaries and the unnamed engineers behind this particular Tecsun.
Go read the reviews on Amazon or, better, eHam. It is held in high regard, though most reviewers aren't "sound quality" obsessed.
Thought you'd enjoy knowing. Let the flames begin, Brothers! (And I have no interest in the company, although I would accept a large share in the company in return for this post
doug