Hello everyone. It is with great pain that I must part with my cherished
Tandberg 3011A tuner. A family member (who is a musician) has a
degenerative eye disease, is now nearing legal blindness and can no longer
see the frequency dial or meters in focus. I need to get a nice tuner
with a numeric digital readout for her. Since my best components are
quite old, I haven't paid much attention to the audio market in around 20
years. Can anyone here recommend any tuners? I'd like to buy a few on
ebay to compare them. Back when I paid attention I remember Magnum
Dynalab was supposed to be pretty good. Are there any others to look for
out there? Gonna put the Tandberg up on ebay.

Thanks,
Michael

Michael L Kankiewicz wrote:

Hello everyone. It is with great pain that I must part with my cherished
Tandberg 3011A tuner. A family member (who is a musician) has a
degenerative eye disease, is now nearing legal blindness and can no longer
see the frequency dial or meters in focus. I need to get a nice tuner
with a numeric digital readout for her...


She just needs something with preset buttons. Unless she has some
unusual reception problems just about any tuner will work--especially
given the dismal state of FM these days. If she listens to AM talk
radio then a dedicated AM radio is likely better than AM sections in
most tuners, these days.


Again, short of having an unusual reception problem, spending a lot of
money on an FM tuner doesn't make much sense to me. You can probably
trade your Tandberg for a decent FM tuner with presets. I have the last
high quality tuner Yamaha made: the TX-950. You can probably get one of
these (or something comparable) on ebay for a hundred dollars or so. I
have had no problems with mine for many years. But the digital display
is very busy, so someone with poor eyesight might not be able to use it
effectively.


mp

Basic Question:

How strong a station for your family member? If he/she is in the
back-of-beyond, I would go for any highly sensitive tuner with
pre-sets, and not worry about anything else. Something like
any-of-several Revox digital tuners. The A720 is rare, will set you
back real money, but has big orange nixie-tube read-outs and
lots-O-presets. The B790 is another excellent choice, also at real
money, with a much smaller red LED-type read-out. Both have big fat
tuning knobs. The B790 knob is a bit 'fast' however if the F/M is
clumsy.

But, if your F/M is in the big city, listening to largely local and
many stations, there is one excellent choice with:

No Read out BUT:

Advent 300. Super tuner, decent _Little_ amp, but the pre-amp is easily
separated from the amp to go with your existing system. And a big,
honking, very low-geared front-and-center tuning knob. Cheap, too. The
center-tuning pair of LEDs is helpful to be on-station and the separate
LED for stereo is also useful. So the F/M may tune by touch on a knob
geared very low so that there is plenty of play between stations.
He/She could tune by ear and use the LEDs to get centered.

No presets, however.

Any of several other digital-read-out tuners such as AR or
Soundcraftsmen or many of the Pacific Rim units tend not to have tuning
knobs, but rely on 'up' and 'down' buttons with LOTS of presets. I do
not think either of those would be satisfying for the need.

Peter Wieck
Wyncote, PA

Please spend some time poking around on the FM Tuner Info site at
www.fmtunerinfo.com

Scroll down a bit and on the left you'll see the name of most any
company that made a tuner.

When you click on a name, you'll see a brief write-up of most of the
tuners that manufacturer ever made.

More importanly, for you, there are also photos of most of these tuners
so you can see exactly what the displays and meters look like.

If you need a large digital display, I believe the $2,000 McIntosh MR85
may have the physically largest display of any new tuner currently
available right now. For less money, the older McIntosh
MR7082/MR7083/MR7084 tuners also had pretty large digital displays and
presets, but these may cost more than you want to spend. And McIntosh
and many tuner techs across the country still work on and support older
McIntosh tuners.

McIntosh is not the only good tuner you can pick: I merely cited them
because some of their older models had large digital displays. Denon,
Marantz, and Yamaha also currently offer FM tuners with digital
displays for less money than the McIntosh's, but their displays are
smaller and I don't know exactly how important the size of the display
is to you relative to how much you wish to spend.

As for Magnum Dynalab, I personally agree with the FM Tuner Group's
comments on the M/D tuners. YMMV, of course.

Finally, you might consider joining their group and posting your
question the They ARE the tuner experts and follow FM tuners a bit
more closely than the members of this august group ;-)