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While McIntosh is a technically worthy company I don't know if this particular tuner-pre has a useful or optimistic signal strength indicator. Optimistic indicators are / were very common - they show very good signal strength on almost all stations. This was so that the tuner looked sensitive to consumers. A truly useful indicator would be more discriminating between stations. the best give readout in numbers aka digits of dBm. How to tell? If you have accessed FM Fool, as suggested, you might find there the transmitted power of a strong station within 10 miles of you and a very weak station also within that radius. College stations down the bottom of the band ~ 90mhz are possibilities for weak stations. If you can't discriminate clearly about their relative signal strengths at your home then Signal strength may not be as good as you currently believe. I'll assume the antenna looks sort of like a basketball hoop but with a folded /double ======== tube with a small gap on one side of the circle? If that's right it is an omni-directional antenna. With very little gain It collects signals equally well from all directions all the time. It will be feeding a lot of signals into your tuner. It can't help the tuner reject strong adjacent-frequency stations that are not in the same direction from your home. Nor can it tune out multi-path. ? MP is reflected signals bouncing off hills, buildings, towers etc. At its worst MP is very audible in a car on FM, but even when it isn't obvious at home it can reduce the pleasantness of the sound. In your most recent post above mine you did not tell me that the noise is on all stations! So signal strength may not be STRONG at all?!
That indicates i) that your tuner isn't getting enough signal and thus that the antenna and cable - as installed - are not up to the job, or ii) limited in the ways mentioned above, or iii) there is something wrong with your tuner. Or iv) all three. Given that you didn't think it relevant, I suspect you haven't absorbed much of the responses. In short, unless you try to absorb all the points and try the suggestions both here and in the second thread you created above, you cannot know nor can you fix the real cause of the noise. It would be a good idea to meet the second point made by 1973Shovel. In total you have been given a pretty complete picture of the possible causes within a coherent overview of FM stereo. I think the words are thank you. Read all responses over a few times, and then get back to us in a new single thread. Okay? ;-) I'm not in America but physics is physics.
Warmest
Tim Bailey
Skeptical Measurer & Audio Scrounger
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