I realized something today: I apparently have a "thing" about tuners

prime minister said:
Not to veer the thread off topic, because that never happens here, but that Buick was a damn fine car. I was too young to drive it, but it just ran forever. Aside from a not unusual TH-400 rebuild, that likely could have been eliminated with yearly transmission fluid changes, it ran over 140,000 basically trouble free miles. Finally the great rust reaper, as was common with 60s and 70s cars, caught up to it. The day the tow truck came to haul it away, it still started, idled and ran beautifully and didn't burn a drop of oil. If not for the rust, I could imagine that car doing twice the mileage.

1971 was still a good year for the auto industry and their product. Yes, the compression ratios dropped, but that big 455 was reasonably unencumbered by emissions controls and the great weight reduction craze brought on by the 1973 gas crunch, hadn't taken hold yet. My dad liked it so much, a used 1975 took its place. Sadly, that car was notably cheaper in build quality with a much more plastic interior. It never ran quite as well, and wasn't as trouble free. To me, however, that car will always be special, as it's the one I learned to drive in.
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I had a '68 Electra 225 back in the early '80s. There was a 430 four-barrel under the hood and it made quite a chunk of power, especially torque. It also drank gas at an incredible rate - my daily commute ran about $100/wk in gas, not easy to do in those days. The trunk was so big I once got a love seat in it and closed the lid.
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mhardy6647 said:
The CA-1010 is rather more fully stuffed with... well... electrical things.
Important electrical things, no doubt.

DSCN6032 by Mark Hardy, on Flickr
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The CA-1010 can be quite remarkable with a very little bit of hot-rodding - somewhere on the TIG site there is some fairly extensive nonsense I wrote many years ago about mine. It currently resides in a system with a CA-1010 in my wife's art supply shop where it provides fine music five days a week. The system also provides something of interest (primarily) for the male customers and spouses to drool over.
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Even stock and as-is, the CA-1010 here sounds pretty good to me.

I don't know if I've ever tried the AM section of it, come to think of it. At the least, it has (appears to have, at any rate) a tuned RF section, so it might actually pick up something. :)
 
I had a little obsession with tuners for quite a few years. Then I got my fill of nice ones and things died down. Tuners get a lot of use around here as we've several very good classical stations with nice signal quality plus three NPR stations. Tuners by Magnum Dynalab, Accuphase, Scott (tube), Revox, Yamaha and Nakamichi are all in use at the moment with a few other interesting creatures in reserve. Then there are a few receivers as well...
 
fiddlefye said:
I had a little obsession with tuners for quite a few years. Then I got my fill of nice ones and things died down. Tuners get a lot of use around here as we've several very good classical stations with nice signal quality plus three NPR stations. Tuners by Magnum Dynalab, Accuphase, Scott (tube), Revox, Yamaha and Nakamichi are all in use at the moment with a few other interesting creatures in reserve. Then there are a few receivers as well...
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One of the stations I listen the most to is CBC Radio 2 Windsor. I listen to it in my car, especially during my morning and afternoon commute pre-pandemic. Actual music being played early in the morning and in the afternoon, unlike all the Detroit radio stations.
 
mhardy6647 said:
So -- our church services, for some reason ;) have been via Zoom for... oh... about a year now.
Well, this morning, while sitting upstairs (where I have a little Zoom workstation set up, Altec Santiago sound reinforcement and all) with Mrs. H, chit-chatting with folks before the service, my mind wandered and I started looking around the room... counting tuners.
AM.
FM.
AM-FM.

I counted twenty-five.

There are some more in the basement.

I may have a little problem.

Thanks for listening.

:o
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Since you mentioned it, I've been aware of this having been a regular visitor to your Flickr stream for a number of years.;)
 
There’s always been just one tuner that meant a lot to me and it’s AM only to boot. Kept me company when falling asleep at night when I was 11-ish, I’ll be 69 years young (or so I keep telling my back) this May. I’ve seen a couple of these come and go on eBay, now and then, but never one fully restored like this one. Purchased from a gentleman in the Toronto area. I hope this is not too far off the rails for this thread.
1964 Philco, five-tube AM Clock Radio.

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MikeT. said:
There’s always been just one tuner that meant a lot to me and it’s AM only to boot. Kept me company when falling asleep at night when I was 11-ish...
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I... ahem... I had one of these in those formative years. I remember listening to WCAO-AM (600 kHz, in Baltimore, owned, rather bizarrely, by The Plough Corporation, a pharmaceutical company) on it pretty much every night in the summer of 1970, just before starting Jr. High school. I can probably rattle off the top 40 of those days by memory... if not, of course, I can always look 'em up.

BILLBOARD MAGAZINE: American music magazine 1894 to Today

Billboard: American music magazine beginning in1894 and now covering music, artists, concerts and the music business.
worldradiohistory.com

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borrowed image, not mine... but I even had the box for many years.
The bean bag part eventually degraded away, and somewhere along the line I pitched the radio... but it's a pretty vivid memory. That was when I really started paying attention to "popular" music, starting with :o Top 40.

EDIT:
1) Damn, now I want one again! ;)
2) Plough later became Schering-Plough (which is now part of... umm... Merck... I think...).
3) The first real job offer I ever had was from Schering-Plough -- rather later, though.
 
Mark, as a teen I lived less than a quarter-mile from WCAO's antenna towers! I think I could have heard it in my teeth. Overwhelmed most anything else on the dial. Wasn't their big DJ Johnny Dark for a long while?

We now return you to the extensive discussion of mhardy's tuner obsession...er, enthusiasm..:rolleyes:
 
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FWIW, and -- of course -- apropos of nothing :) This is what that little radio looked like under the kilt, so to speak.
The beanbag did provide some -- perhaps -- aperiodic damping of the back wave (there are slots in the bottom of that black plastic bottom of the radio visible in the borrowed photo above).

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1tumbleweed said:
Mark, as a teen I lived less than a quarter-mile from WCAO's antenna towers! I think I could have heard it in my teeth. Overwhelmed most anything else on the dial. Wasn't their big DJ Johnny Dark for a long while?

We now return you to the extensive discussion of mhardy's tuner obsession...er, enthusiasm..:rolleyes:
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Yup.
I must confess, I don't know where their transmitter was -- I do know where most of B-more's transmitters/towers were, my father having been in that biz for a while, albeit slightly before my time. I have a vague sense that they might've been in Pikesville?

FWIW, we lived fairly close (three or four miles) to WFBR's towers, which were near the Hanover St. Bridge in B-more.

Perhaps as a consequence of that adjacency -- one of my father's EV Wolverines would pick up WFBR all by itself. His theory was that the speaker wire (and maybe the VC too) acted as the antenna and tuned circuit, and some discontinuity somewhere in the VC or in the tinsel leads served as detector... and, of course, an LS12 is more than sensitive enough to produce audible signal from a self-generated foxhole radio. :smoke

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mhardy6647 said:
Yup.
I must confess, I don't know where their transmitter was -- I do know where most of B-more's transmitters/towers were, my father having been in that biz for a while, albeit slightly before my time. I have a vague sense that they might've been in Pikesville?
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Yessir. Park Heights extended, just a hair north of Old Court Road.

BTW, *my* first real job, in high school, was with WITH, when their transmitters were at Route 40 East, near Westview.

Seems a shame how AM radio has fallen mostly to the wayside...but back then that was mostly all we had...
 
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