FM alive and well here...curious question

Yamaha TX-950

A few months ago I was lucky enough to pick up a Marantz 10b from the original owner's wife after he passed away. I haven't listened to the radio in years but I had heard a 10b in an all Marantz system (8b and 7c) and was amazed at the sound quality.  It was like listening to vinyl.

This unit cleaned up very nicely and even the oscillascope is working.  Only two tubes had any leakage.  All the original amperex bugle boy 12ax7's and au7's are working great.

i live in Ann Arbor and have several NPR options.  But my wife and I have mad a habit of weekend listening to WDET.  Signal picks up OK with an MD ST-2 on the roof but have to switch to mono to reduce noise.  I have to say I feel more connected to Detroit music now that we are frequent listeners to WDET.  FM sounds great!

karl_desch

unfortunately, that's one of the ways to acquire a nice 10B.

I couldn't get my wallet to open enough for the minimum $25-2700 decent units are going for.

I'm curious if demand continues to decline, just how low 10B's will eventually drop to?

Since I love KCRW from Santa Monica so much. I bought a xdrguy modified Sony XDR F1HD tuner (discontinued model) from eBay. It was delivered yesterday.

I have a Magnum Dynalab St-2 antenna (located in a porch) and this antenna is connected to my Magnum Dynalab Signal Stealth. I am using a coax cable splitter to send the antenna signal from the Stealth to 2 tuners, the Sony (FM + HD) and a Magnum Dynalab 205. The analog output of both are fed into my Benchmark DAC2 HGC. I can quickly switch the inputs from each analog tuner. So it is easy to tell the differences in sound quality. This is in office system.

I did a quick test this morning while KCRW was playing music on FM (news for most of the afternoon). The Sony ($350 after mods) was almost as good as the $2000 Magnum Dynalab 205 on FM. Pretty shocking give how low cost the Sony is (although upgraded with mods). The Magnum sounded bigger slighter less constrained but the Sony was pretty close.

I bought the Sony so that I can listen to the HD stream of KCRW which plays music 24 x 7. The sound of that is not as good as FM (sounds a bit harsher, but surprisingly not too bad). So I can now see why people are raving about this Sony tuner. A tremendous value.

Someone earlier in the thread asked what was to bit rates of the internet radio that I was listening too. It was 320kbps or lower. In fact I was a paid subscriber to MOG streaming service and they did 320kbps. I liked that stream quality when I listened on my cheap AudioengineUSA A2 speakers but when I upgraded to KEF LS50 speakers the music was not tolerable for me on 320kbps. FM sounds great on these same speakers.

Anyways, I thought I would share some of this ramble with you all.