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great sound easy to use and setup.only down fall is it has no volume control.
on its bright LCD screen. Minor stuff, and if you know what you are doing, correctable.I am in the broadcasting industry and would seriously consider using this tuner in critical applications. More on that later. It's that good.Oh. The AM performance is excellent, although a bit narrow-band for my tastes.What's not as stellar. The bright LCD screen does not dim when the power is off, the tuner 'forgets' its presets if there is a power interruption of some length, it runs hot, and the supplied FM dipole is too long by about 6". This is one amazing tuner.
The Sony locks on to the digital carrier quickly, and displays the transmitted call sign, etc. The performance on regular FM is on a par with the most expensive tuners. Superb sensitivity and selectivity. It has a decent manual and a good remote control, too.
This is a huge advantage.Some issues:The unit runs extremely hot when tuning HD, hot when running, and very warm when off.The back light cannot be turned off and remains lit when the power is turned off--this is a major flaw.No optical output is a major omission for something that is just a tuner.You cannot input a frequency. This is a major, crucial feature, and I'm very happy with it.On AM Radio, even if the analog signal has static and interference, the HD Radio signal still comes on with crystal-clear audio. You must tune up or down one step or use presets.The radio does remember its presets when AC power is removed, so I'm not seeing what other reviewers said.The tuning buttons are to the left of the preset buttons meaning that I accidentally hit the preset when I want to "tune up" or "tune down".Tuning off an HD channel is easy to do accidentally and tuning back takes a while for the HD to come back.The tuner machine picks up alot of its own digital hash on AM.Nighttime AM HD is currently banned by the industry due to adjacent channel interference so your AM radio will go to analog when local sunset occurs.One word about talk radio: Even though HD Radio has been around for a few years most broadcasting equipment in my area is not upgraded well enough to provide clean broadcasting, especially on AM talk radio stations whose old analog signal covered up a world of audio hurt that you can now hear in HD. The receiver is a tuner that is very small and intended to plug into your existing stereo system in a living room setting and it does this very well.Acquiring HD is the fastest I've experienced, not the 8 seconds it should be, but close enough.There is a really handy arrow that tells you if there are more subchannels and if you should tune 'up' or 'down' to hear them. You hear the talk radio host sip his coffee.Remote is handy and not as useless as others think.Presets can be set to HD subchannels. Talk radio is hard to listen to unless it's a national show that is well produced and processed. This is really handy since it takes a while to tune HD signals, even on the best tuners.Sound is excellent. You'll hear background sound, hiss, hum, and feedback which would otherwise be masked by traditional AM broadcasting.
Good FM sound, analog or HD.Four faults: Analog AM is telephone quality. No "stay in analog" button. It has excellent recetion on analog and HD FM. Frequency settings aren't backed up by a battery. RDS display doesn't capture all the text info, i.e. The adjacent channel electivity enables me to hear weak stations next to strong local ones. the "now playing" scrolling text.It's only [.]., so these faults are excusable.
I love this little tuner. The difference is striking, but not as striking as the HD stations. Playing radio through my Pioneer speakers never sounded so great.
Frankly, I am bowed over. I connected the tuner to my receiver through the recorder jacks. The tuner displays a clock when turned off.
Of course, if you already know the station number you may key it in with the remote control.The fact is, even the Analogue stations sound better with this tuner than the tuner built into my Sony receiver. When turned on it will scan for Analogue stations and/or Hibred Digital stations. A second click stop scanning and hold the station being sampled.
Can you guess what I can do now.
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