Originally Posted by
DSJR
Hi Barry, The internet is a funny thing, when we can't explain any more than our typing ability...:)
The "Sound quality" of tuners wasn't taken into serious consideration in the mid seventies, any more than the perceived sound quality of vinyl sources. When I say "radio" performance, I mean the usual measured parameters such as sensitivity, selectivity etc.. The likes of the Yamaha CT7000, Sansui 7700 and 9900 (I think that's the model numbers) and Accuphase 101 (?) were far more interesting technically and visually - they happened to sound great too, but that was a bonus back then).
In the company of all these relatively huge and lavishly finished Japanese tuners, the mid seventies UK efforts from Quad, Rogers, EAD (?) and Sugden looked crude and "quaint" by comparison, despite actually sounding good.
I hope that answers your question. It's not my habit to contradict myself or cause confusion in my posts. I didn't realise how basically "truthful" the FM3 could be until some years later, when listening to a proms concert actually sounded like a good facsimile of a proms I'd attended earlier that week (I worked in the West End then and regularly attended concerts at the RFH, RAH and rock gigs at the Hammersmith Odeon (Apollo), the BBC's Paris Theatre and Virgin's "The Venue").
I must say though, that in the late seventies, many reviewers used to feed a high quality music source into an FM modulator, fed into the tuner's aerial input and then the sound output of the tuner was level matched and compared with the source. All very clinical and objective, but this did give a fair hearing to these items.
