I live in Manhattan in an environment very similar to yours: 6/10 mile from the Empire State Building on the 21st floor of a 35 story building with four 35-57 story buildings within several blocks of me. In our respective locations, reception difficulty tends to be due to multipath distortion or problems with spurious rejection. I have lived in this neighborhood for 22 years and have had a couple of good tuners, neither of which completely satisfied me. I have had the Pioneer TX-9100, a classic solid state tuner from the '70s. It had serious problems with multipath which could be evenly only moderately tamed with the tunable indoor antennas such as the BIC Beam Box or the various powered TERK antennas. About two years ago, I sold the Pioneer and bought a Marantz 10B. As good as the Pioneer sounded, the Marantz was a significant improvement in sound, but the station-pulling power of this tuner in my environment I found to be disappointing. For me, as well as Vayasteve, the goal is to pull in a noise-free WBGO 88.3 in stereo. This tuner cannot do that with a TERK antenna and it has spurious rejection problems where very strong local stations transmitting on other frequencies are received at spurious frequencies and dominate the weaker stations particularly at the low end of the dial. I have hesitated to try the Fanfare or Magnum Dynalab whip antennas since they are omnidirectional, thus exposing me to severe multipath distortion, and they have to be placed indoors. Before I give up on the Marantz, I will probably need to try one of these omnidirectional whip antennas and I may spring for an alignment of the tuner, although I don't see where the tuner actually needs it. So that is my tale of woe. My feeling is that a current Magnum Dynalab tuner will most likely allow for improved reception of these difficult stations, but perhaps at some sonic expense compared with the Marantz 10B. For reception problems, I doubt that a current top-of-the line Magnum Dynalab will be "overkill", if you are interested in those "tough" stations at the low end of the dial. There is also a chance that it may not completely satisfy you, even with any of the usual indoor antenna products. If you want to listen to KISS-FM or even WQXR, my advice is just to get the best sounding tuner possible and not to worry about reception. In fact, if you just listen to KISS, or nearly any other rock or any other commercially programmed station in our area other than WQXR, sound quality of the tuner will not matter much either.
