AM tuner performance?

Perhaps you could suggest he locate the tuner well away from all other equipment & electrical fields & buy an AM loop antenna from Radio Shack. These basic steps will do wonders for reception with any AM tuner/radio/reciever.

Citation is correct. AM reception can be decent on any tuner, but the antenna connection needs to be more than the wire that comes with most tuners if anything at all. Some old analog receivers (Rotel is one) had an internal ferrite bar that worked pretty well.

My parents still have an old Tube Sylvania AM table radio. Still works and reception is very very good (just the internal ferrite bar antenna). Automobiles radios have good AM reception also, so it is just the audio companies saving money. The Creek and Cambridge Audio Tuners (both designed by Mike Creek) use a high-end car stereo chipset. I wonder if the AM is good on those tuners?

Unfortunately, the vast majority of AM tuners historically have used diode-type envelope detectors, which have inherent distortion, noise, and sensitivity problems. Most roll off the high end at 5 to 10 kHz to reduce adjacent-channel interference.

I don't blame the manufacturers much; there's not been much demand for good AM receivers. Most people think of talk radio, sports, and news when they think of AM. I haven't been following lately who's making what types of AM receivers, but if you can find one with a decent product detector instead of a diode detector, they can sound really nice. Not many people know that despite the 10 kHz spacing on the band, AM stations can actually broadcast up to 15 kHz audio bandwidth. And some do so.

I've been meaning for years to get around to building my own product detector and tap it into the IF stage on one of my receivers. But it slipped behind a lot of other projects, and thanks to this thread, I might get back into it.