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In Reply to: 10B posted by tesla on November 28, 2006 at 11:59:59:
the old joke about the boat owner...-What's the happiest day in a 10B owner's life? the day he/she buys his/her 10B...
-What's the happiest day in a 10B owner's life? the day he/she sells his/her 10B...
I've owned a couple - one cosmetically beautiful but with an optocoupler problem, and one sonically good but cosmetically not.
What I liked about my 10B (the pretty one) was that it looked like a tuner should look, in my opinion. The good-sounding 10B sounded very good, but it is hard to justify the price on performance.
And of course, like any boatless boat owner, I still pine for, and will likely one day again own a 10B...
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JUST change the faceplate !!!!!!!
Hi, caffeinator:Having done surgery on those LDR modules, and having posted a description of their contents to this forum before, let me again say that there is NO MAGIC in them nor any MYSTERY about them at all.
They consist of one or two neon lamps and either one or a pair of cadkium disulfide photo cells.
I have found parts which work in the fabrication/rebuilding of modules for my tuners right on the shelves of your neighborhood Radio Shack Stores.
Otherwise, the 10-Bs that I own all have problems on occasion with "spontaneous loss of detection". That, too, I have described previously.
Do you want a good sounding and RELIABLE tubed tuner? Get a Fisher FM-200-B and sit back and enjoy!
Based on your post about the 10B optocouplers a while back, I got up the "courage" to deconstruct one the the dual versions I'd saved from repairing my 10B. I was hoping that the failure mode was simply a worn out Ne2 bulb so rejuvination would be easy. Instead what I found was a couple of intermittent CdS photocells.The intermittency was caused by CdS cell leads that had been pulled loose from the cell internally. They were easily rotated and could be pulled right out of the cell with little force. I attribute this condition to the way the optocouplers were constructed. Internal construction had the cells pulled up tight by their leads to a circular plug of dense foam. The foam plug assy was then inserted into the can and potting compound was poured over the foam to seal it. It appears that the potting compound would shrink causing the cell leads to be strained. Since the foam had no give to it, the leads eventually pulled loose from the cell.
I thought that replacing the cells would be easy but I was wrong. Clairex used to mfg a wide variety of CdS cells and Mouser used to carry them. Apparently Clairex got out of the business and there are few mfgrs remaining and with limited variety. I read somewhere that CdS cell mfg was in the process of being phased out worlwide because Cd is a hazardous material and electronic components utilizing it are probably not ROHAS compliant.
Anyway, next stop was Radio Shack per your post. RS does (did?) carry a pkg of "assorted" experimenter grade CdS cells but only a 1 or 2 cells out of ~ 10 in the pkg seemed to have the proper characteristics. I ended up having to buy something like 8 or 10 pkgs to get 5 usable cells. At this point I was beginning to wonder if the project was worth the effort an put the whole thing on the shelf for another day.
After all this work in tracking down fast vanishing materials to recreate an outdated technology I think the real answer is finding some way of adapting a modern, off-the-shelf opto-isolator with an FET output. I probably ought to get on this sooner rather than later because I don't think there will be much FM programming worthy of a decent FM tuner around much longer.
As a parting aside, I've never experienced the "loss-of-detection" condition so may 10B users report. Was the cause ever tracked down or is it just one of those quirks of a legenday consumer product and I've been lucky?
Hi, Steve:Much thanks for the follow-up regarding the optocouplers. I guess it has been quite a while since I obtained what I needed!
There has never been a definitive answer to the apparent "spontaneous loss of detection" issue with the Marantz 10-B, but some have alleged it to be cause of weak front-end tubes. There is a 6DL4 and another one in there which some say, trigger the problem. John Atwood, of One Electron, owns a 10-B and even he told me that this happened to his tuner. He believed that the probable cause might be some sort of feedback loop phenomena.
John once mentioned that the more he used his tuner, ie, the longer he left it on, the less the problem occurred.
In other words, we must keep experimenting in the hope that someone comes up with the actual definitive cause!
The guy who runs L & M Electronics in San Francisco once cobbled up his own circuit board to replace these optocouplers and that was just about twenty years ago. I am not an engineer, so I definitely do not have the expertise to design such a drop-in circuit.
However, in the days of Audio Amateur Magazine, someone might have published their own solution!
Hey, if anybody out there is clever enough to do this, by all means SHARE THE INFORMATION while FM broadcasting, as we know it, exists!
Yup...I briefly investigated optocoupler replacement at the time, but realized I could try a lot of less expensive (but not necessarily lesser) tuners for a fraction of the 10B's price...I've tried some Fisher tuners, haven't had the pleasure of the FM200B, though...I tried to snag an FM100 a couple of times on ebay after it came out very well in the VTV tuner shootout, but the price started to climb...thanks for the suggestion, though.
For now, I've been enjoying some Kenwood solid state tuners - the KT7500 at present - very nice performer, economical, and it has a similar classic tuner look (to the 10B), to my eye.
Hi, caffeinator!It may interest you to know that I was at the original VTV Tuner "Shootout" and my picture appeared in that issue among the other evaluators.
There were really no scientific controls in that audition, however.
The Fisher FM-100-B is among the best sounding of all Fisher tuners and I should know. I have owned almost all of them in the past.
In fact, the best sounding tubed tuner I have ever listened through was a Fisher FM-100-B which I updated with some capacitors, but I sold it about five years ago to a nice person who never complained!
My current project is a Kenwood KT-8007. This is a tuner from about 1974 and believe me when I say this---IT SOUNDS TERRIFIC~!
Enjoy whatever pleases you--while conventional FM over-the-air broadcasting still exists. From then on it will be a probable dip in quality--sort of like MP-3.
Pretty soon, folks will no longer know what good sound reproduction really sounds like.
:-(
Ah, technology! One step forward, three and a half back.
I love reading about 24-bit / 192 kHz sampling, etc. which largely winds up on iPods. Talk about tossing the baby out with the bathwater?
I am developing an affection for Kenwood tuners - currently looking for one to spell my daily use tuner (KT7500) so I can put it on the bench and make some mods to it.And the Fisher sound, I have to agree, is lush and wonderful. I spent a lot of time listening to an FM101-R, and though a little on the warm side for music (depending on the genre), it made anything in the vocal range as mellifluous as warmed honey. I have a Fisher 500 (B, I think) for background in the kitchen/nook that may never leave, it sounds so good.
But don't you think that 10B just looks soooooooo like a tuner should?
Hi, caffeinator!Kenwood tuners are superb sounding and represent quite a bargain, as compared to the alternatives out there. One advantage that I have found is that they show up in local flea markets and the sellers rarely know about their inherent value, sonically or monetarily.
A good number of the best tuners I have ever owned have come from excursions to local Bay Area flea markets. All three of my Yamaha CT-7000's, some of my Fishers and every one of the Kenwoodsd were acquired this way.
You asked what I thought of the 10-B' looks?
Put yourself back in about 1962-3 when it was introduced and imagine what we audiophiles thought of an FM tuner which retailed for $600 in a market where that kind of money would almost get you a Fisher 500-C and a pair of AR-3a's and you will have an answer!
It was supremely unaffordible except for the Doctor/Lawyer class, who largely purchased them.
I still own three examples, one in an original professional 19" rackmount faceplate and it sits attached to the proper support bracket in my living room rack.
Yes, they are beautiful, particularly in the dark!
YOU SHOULD NEVER TRY TO CLEAN THE GLASS PANES IN A 10-B WITH WINDEX or you will be singing a very bluesy tune! I have to tell you that I often hear from folks whose 10-B dials are clean as a whistle, with no more lettering on them!
Anyway, thanks and happy listening!
Mine is unmodified compare to some of the fm that I have owned in the past I thought that it ranks right up there at the top. I could be wrong though.
Hi, millen:I honestly have never even seen a Nikko Gamma V tuner before! I just took a look at some which are currently offered on eBay or were featured in recent auctions. Anyway, I now know what they look like!
I guess they sound decent, but to be honest with you, I do recall the old Nikko brand name components from the seventies and I was then and still am now, not very impressed with their product line.
I also do not much favor synthetized tuners. There is something about them which just turns me off (no pun!).Aside from all of the analog tuners I own these days, I also own a Soundstream digital FM tuner from the mid eighties, which is built like a tank. A couple of years ago, it showed up at a local recycling center nearby and I grabbed it! This tuner was once a $600 item, but you would simply not believe my luck in finding this one and would probably faint if you knew what I got it for!
The tuner sounds terrific, but I still favor tuners with mechanical dials which light up and devices which have the option of more selective tuning, in other words, analog tuners!
Hey, if the Nikko works for you, that is wonderful!
I see a great number of digital tuners like the Nikko so, when I do spot them in various places, I just go "neat", but I also walk away.
Just my personal two cents, so please don't take it personally!
The Gamma V is a very sensitive and selective rack-mount style digital tuner. It is a better DX performer in stock form than most digitals we've tested, with the equivalent of 6 gangs, but the Gamma V also sounds terrific with particularly good bass. It uses one linear phase LC filter block in wide mode and adds two more in narrow, both of which are adjustable for best linearity (but because it uses no ceramic filters, it is not suitable for filter modification). There are also dual transformers for powering the digital and analog section to prevent corruption of the analog power supply. Construction is all frame and beam with heavy shielding around the front end and digital control sections, with beams running from the front to the back of the tuner to further isolate noise-producing circuitry from the audio circuitry. Fixed, variable, and scope outputs are provided on the rear panel. Our contributor Ryan recently aligned and analyzed a Gamma V, and provides the following commentary: "When this tuner is fully aligned, it can be better than any stock tuner I have ever heard. The sound is superb from top to bottom, and the measurements back it up. Spectral analysis showed that IM distortion was essentially nonexistent, THD at any frequency over 1 kHz was at .009% or under, and separation was 60 dB out to 10 kHz. In my experience, this just does not happen with almost any stock tuner at any price. I attribute this in large part to the superbly linear IF strip that seems to pay good attention to group delay characteristics, and good ratio detector coupled with the HA11223W multiplex. But do keep in mind that the Gamma V is two decades old, and without alignment you will not get these results, and because of the LC filters, it is no ultra-selective DXer. And like many vintage tuners, birdies can be a problem on stations loaded with SCA subcarriers."Excerpt from Tuner Info....
Thanks, millen!I sure will keep my eyes open for one of these but I already own a stack of fine FM tuners, as you probably know by now.
Great images and excellent commentary!
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