Digital vs. Analog tuner sound

I've been playing with an old digital Pioneer F-77 tuner and a vintage analog TX-520. This is my first experience listening critically to FM, and I'm a little shocked by the difference between these units.

My brain says the digital tuner is best--the soundstage is wider, the sound has more depth. But it is emotionally uninvolving. The highs are piercing; some of my favorite music is rendered unlistenable.

The analog is a little fuzzy, but much warmer. I can't imagine being offended by this tuner--but it lacks detail.

Do modern units make you compromise to this extent, or are these characteristics specific to these units?

eskimo

 

Depends, as they say, on the tuner.
If you're listening to AM, analog tuners often hands down blow away their PLL brethren. Of all my shortwave/am receivers the analog Panasonic RF4900 and cheapo Grundig S350 have so much better sound than my Sony SW7600g or my Yachtboy. For FM, things get a little more difficult to say. My Revox I am quite sure lets me on everything coming through the air and has great separation. On the other hand, I know people who swear by Leak Troughlines. This is one of those we can argue to the cows come home....
Jeff
That said, send a big tube Marantz or Mac tuner my way, and you won't hear from me for months.

 

It would be specific to the model. Having said that, there's a lot of tuners out there like you described.

If you want something a bit more modern than old tube, try a NAD tuner. It should sound better than the Pioneer you've mentioned.

 

Hi Mr eskimo/Jeff et al,

Speaking from personal experience, the first thing you should sort out is a half decent antenna, in some instances you might be OK with a piece of wire (i.e. in Jeffs back garden ;-) but even something like the Fanfare antennae available over in the States will pay dividends.

I run a restored/realigned HH Scott 350c tuner here in the UK (theres not many of those over here), thanks to Jeff, and it's great. IMHO a tube tuner is the way to go. Over there Scott's were plentiful and your should be able to pick-up a decent example and have enough left over to get it checked out before getting into Marantz/Mac expenditure (much as they are very nice).

Cheers,
MarkM.

 

Hi MarkM and Mr Eskimo (or should that be Ms. Inuit).
Absolutely, a good aerial is at least half the battle. I use a Magnum Dynalab made just north of Toronto mounted on my Chimney.
As Mark says, Scott's are terrific tuners specifically designed for North American listening. Troughies and the like are for listening to the Home Service and a bit of cricket, albeit in glorious melifluous Troughline fashion. Jeff

 

The Magnum Dynalab line isn't any slouch of an analog tuner either IMHO.

 

Magnum Dynalab is no slouch, that's certainly the case.
Last year or the year before, along with SimAudio, they made a beautiful receiver complete with wooden side cheeks.
I bet it would have been glorious. I am sorry I missed it. Jeff

 

Ok, I picked up an old NAD 4020A. Almost the best of both worlds. Much clearer than the Pioneer Analog, more defined bass and midrange than the F-77 digital. Not quite the soundstage of the F-77, but neither is it fatiguing.

Thanks for the recommendation!

eskimo

 

In this context does "digital" mean "digital audio" or merely "digital tuning"?

Do the older radios soften some of the nastiness that the radio stations may be transmitting? (Virtually all radio stations nowadays do a *significant* amount of processing, mainly dynamic compression of various sorts. Some of it is quite nasty.)

I recently wanted to tape a friend's performance off the radio. I would have planned to use my old Adcom GTP-400, but it has dirty selector switches, and I wasn't going to be around at the time of the broadcast to make sure they were "working", so I tried to tune in the station on a new JVC 5.1 receiver. The JVC was unlistenably noisy. The Adcom (when the switches were making contact) was just fine (same antenna).

(I lost the broadcast. I went with the Adcom, and the switches crapped out. Nothing but distortion. Sigh. At least the incident spurred me on to order replacement switches. I'll put them in after I get my AMC preamp back from repairs - it's been one of *those* months.)

I think it (the Adcom) has a very good sounding (analog) tuner, though the (digital) mode of tuning is annoying. I liked it when you turned a knob to change the station. Actually when our station was broadcasting classical music, I used to wonder if it didn't sound "better" coming from the Adcom than it did going out the transmitter. Hmmmm...

 

Digital audio--"Digital Signal Processing for Digital Audio".

Just worked on the antenna a bit; this NAD completely blows the Pioneers out of the water. I love this stuff. My terrible speakers (we won't even go into what they are--too embarrasing) sound listenable with this tuner and a new/old 7700 amp. I keep looking over at the gear with a perplexed expression--Is this my system?

 

Oops, things got a bit out of sequence when I edited my post while eskimo was replying.

 

How many stations broadcast from MP3 or other compressed media formats?

 

I think it's not particularly common to use mp3 files as such; but there is a lot of "lossy compression" in broadcast audio right now. MP3 is more likely to show up as a transmission compression scheme.

Lots of stations use MiniDisk sources a lot of the time. MD is popular for recording "in the field", and some stations use MD decks to replace tape cart machines, meaning the music is on minidisk.

"Remotes", whether live broadcasts or interviews with the guest at a remote station or whatever, are commonly done using ISDN lines with some form of compression. There are a lot of options. For example, one popular codec offers these choices:
G.722 at 56kbps which sounds pretty ghastly by today's standards, but will usually work when all other methods fail - it's been around longest and practically every audio ISDN codec has a G.722 mode
MP3 at 64 kbps mono or stereo (128kbps total for stereo)
MP2 at 128 kbps mono only (actually it will do 64kbps, but that sounds poor and is rarely used.)
etc. There are also codecs that will bond several ISDN channels for higher bit rates, so higher budget remote network shows may run at 360kbps with consequently lower compression rates.

The current NPR satellite system uses Musicam, basically MP2 at 128 kbps/channel at 48khz sampling.

Presently our STLs (studio to transmitter links) are running Apt-X compression (4:1) though we're planning to upgrade to linear pcm when we move to our new studios this summer.

Probably most audio at radio stations nowadays is recorded onto hard disk and the popular "automation" systems offer various options for compression, or linear audio. Many are still using compression. I haven't done a survey, but I suspect MP2 is much more common than MP3.

The M-Peg compression suite, the famiy that MP3 and MP2 belong to, was designed to work together. MP2 is supposed to be more "robust" in that it is less susceptible to degredation over multiple generations than is MP3. MP3 was *only* supposed to be used on the final end product, so there was never more than a single generation of MP3 compression. On a single generation, MP3 may give better performance for a given bandwidth than MP2. But things don't always work out according to plan.

So while stations generally are trying to move towards linear PCM whenever it's practical, there's still a *lot* of compressed stuff out there.

 

Hi,

As a rule of thumb - in the UK - most compressed to least compressed:

BBC Radio 1 - Charts/current Pop/Dance
BBC Radio 2 - Older Pop/60s/50s & earlier / MOR / some jazz
BBC Radio 3 - Classical / some jazz
BBC Radio 4 - Current Affairs / Plays / Stories / Documentaries

But even on my half-decent set-up (restored Scott / restored Leak Stereo 20 / 17 element roof mounted antenna) R4 still sounds a bit sibilant sometimes.

Cheers,
MM.

 

Mark,

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're talking about dynamic compresson. Radio stations do lots of that, but it's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm talking about the sort of psycho-acoustic data-reduction, in which information that is supposedly is "inaudible" is thrown out in order to reduce the file-size or transmission bandwidth in digital systems.

--Steve

 

Most do not use MP3 Largly it is MP2 at varied bit and sample rates. A few still use Dopby AC2 as a compression scheme.


Uncompressed STL's are all the rage and sound really good.

IBOC or the "DIgital FM" is an MPEG scheme at a 128 bit bit rate.

Will sound better than XM or Sirius. Implementation is going to be the key. Pretty Big Cap Ex expendature. Digital AM will sound as good as present Day FM.

This will change programming philosophies and make AM viable as something other than news/sports/talk or gospel formats.


IT's going to bea fun time for radio soon.

 

Hi Steve G,

You are right - I was refering to dynamic compression - sorry for the confusion.

Regards,
M.

 

Magnum Dynalab MD-90

This is an analog tuner that is very natural sounding. It just sounded right to me so I bought one on the spot. I recommend it highly to anyone looking, listen for yourself at a dealer.

 

The difference, as I understand it, between digital and analog AM/FM tuners is in how they tune to the station, it has nothing to do with how they treat the audio. Digital tuners tend to keep the filters better aligned with each other, they are, however, limited in their ability to tune slightly off-band if necessary (and it frequently is).

 

Gerry, you are right about the difference between digital and analog AM/FM tuners. My local radio station that I listen to the most does play lots of music from MP3s. If any of you want the latest news in the radio business, please sign up for All Access. For personal home use of the site, if they ask for "Station Call letters" type home and for formats you work with, I clicked the type of stations I have in my area. You will also keep up on what's being added to radio station's playlist and more. Their site is at www.allaccess.com

 

Keep in mind that mp3 doesn't necessarily have to sound bad. It's a question of bandwidth; allocate enough and it can really sound quite good. It is true, as sgraham posted earlier, that mp3 falls apart much more quickly under re-compression than less-lossy algorithms (mp2, etc).