Re: stereo and mono signals

["Eli Polonsky" <elipolo@earthlink.net>]

Most consumer grade home and portable receivers are poor these days. Some car receivers are still fairly good, but on FM only. AM quality is currently terrible on most everything.

For my main system I have a Marantz and a Sansui, both 100+ watts per channel, and both somewhere between 25 and 30 years old. The FM reception blows away anything in affordable digital or analog receivers I've seen in the past couple of decades, and the sound quality and power on both are incredible.

I needed something smaller for my "computer" table, and I found a very early all-digital Akai from about 20 years ago cheap in a used audio store. It seems pretty good.

For AM in my main system I use a 1985 Radio Shack analog AM stereo tuner plugged into the auxiliary of either the Marantz or the Sansui, whichever I'm using. On the "computer" table I run a Y-adapter from the headphone jack of my 1985 Sony AM stereo walkman to the auxiliary input of the Akai tuner.

If they had made CD players 25 or 30 years ago I would try to find one of that vintage, but we're stuck with the disposables on those.


> Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 14:34:11 -0500 (EST)
> From: Sven Franklyn Weil <sven@gordsven.com>
> Subject: RE: stereo and mono signals

> I have two old (20-year old or so) huge radios at 
> home - one is a Marantz and the other is a Harman-
> Kardon.  Both have very decent FM tuners. The AM 
> section is crappy -- good for pretty much only 
> local stations (using a select-a-tenna).  But I get
> very good reception on both using just dipole 
> antennae made out of zip-cord.  
> 
> In a publication put out by Consumer Reports about 
> two years ago, they made mention of the poor FM 
> (and even poorer AM) performance of present-day 
> home stereo radios.


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