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In Reply to: First impression of Kenwood KW-55 receiver upgrade posted by Neff on April 13, 2008 at 19:20:55:
I concentrated on the FM tuner section today. I rolled some tubes and three Telefunken 6AU6s offered an edge in performance over RCA 6AU6 as being slightly more clean sounding. No difference in the 6BA6s. Another issue is a dimension control. I suggest to simply turn it to the lowest setting. It adds some low level distortion when turned up and stereo seperation is not enhanced. The Kenwood tuner section is very sensitive and exceeds most tube tuners. It is also reasonably selective with four IF sections. Kenwood was involved with two-way radio communications back years ago and still today so the tuner sensitivity is not a surprise.
I ompared the built-in Kenwood tuner with seperate FM tuner units including Pioneer AFT-14 with some audio cap mods, a stock Eico 2200, a modified Eico 2200 with superior audio capacitors and a Fisher KM-60 with audio capacitor upgrades as well. All forementioned tuners have been aligned. The Kenwood is better than the good performing Pioneer AFT-14 in the upper frequencies, however that AFT-14 is very smooth sounding. The Kenwood is a fair amount better than the stock Eico 2200. It is slightly behind the Fisher KM-60 and the modified Eico 2200 outperforms all.
The Kenwood KW-55 has about eight hours on the new tubes and capacitors. Every hour the sound improves. Changing out the 12AX7 cathode bypass capacitors is needed and I will perform that this week. Old electrolytics are inferior even when new years ago compared to new offerings such as Panasonic FM series capacitors manufactured today.
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- 2nd day impression of Kenwood KW-55 receiver upgrade - Neff 17:57:32 04/14/08 (0)
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