Here is my new (to me) Technics tuner …

This is the reason that I defected from Blogger to here. I attempted to upload this image to the old Blogger blog. Nothing. Well known fault. Well, I am too intolerant of things not working. I ain’t got time!

I have decided to stop listening to digital radio, FM sounding a lot less artificial. This is made possible by the fact that we are sitting near the top of a ridge with good sightlines to Mount Dandenong, where a lot of stations have their transmitters. Anyway, I had quite a happy hour or so in the Melbourne Hifi Exchange browsing among the vintage FM tuners. There is a great site called fmtunerino.com which has reviews of hundreds of tuners, and which I referred to before and during the visit. There was a nice looking Marantz tuner, but unfortunately this had sold. Some tuners are “collectable”, i.e. people buy them for their looks rather than their performance. I finally selected a Technics tuner which was quite well reviewed, looks the business, but isn’t collectable and thus was reasonably priced. Here is a comparo with the most favoured tuner http://www.fmtunerinfo.com/shootouts.html#ST-8080 . The guy plugged it into his stereo to demonstrate it, and a fellow customer held up the ribbon aerial for me! (I swapped notes with the latter about having his Luxman tube power amp fixed, which sounds like a similar model to mine. Having been through it and parted with a fair chunk of cash, I was able to advise him, as per the Nike ad, “Just do it”.) The place is really more of a hobbyist hangout than a proper shop, but all rather good fun.