Pretty light meters

Unreliable Costly and inconvenient repairs.

Have owned this tuner for 2.5 years, of which one year it spent sitting in the box. Suddenly it has stopped working-not a sound out of it. Why would a tuner quit? My $20 clock radio has run for 20 yrs!! So I phone up Magnum and they start quoting me a list of shipping costs and costs for condescending to look at the unit, etc, etc, etc, etc.... AMAZING-sell $1000 tuners(or tuners costing 5 times that much) that are embarrassingly unreliable, then start quoting me how much it will cost to fix it...They should pay me. Like my clock radio, my $150 digital Pioneer tuner has been working for 15yrs without a single hitch!!! Apart from the disappointment and embarrassment of being duped by this company, the "improvement" in sound, in absolutely no way warrants the extra cost over a cheap mainstream unit. If you live in an urban area do not waste your money on any of these tuners...put it into some other component. I'm sending this back-they can keep it-my faithful Pioneer is now in system-where it always should have been

Similar Products Used:

Fortunately none-excluding my far more reliable and far cheaper Pioneer tuner.

Excellent reception, incredible depth and detail

None that my ears can discern

I have never owned an expensive tuner. 2 years ago I upgraded to a very good system with a Bryston amp, VTL pre-amp, Adcom CD player and Kef speaker. I decided to audition several tuners nearly two years ago. I was reluctant to get a tuner without presets and a remote. But when I listened I couldn't beleive my ears. The sound and reception were nothing I ever thought possible to attain from the radio. If you have a quality component system and live near an urban area where there are lots of interestaing stations it is very much a worthwhile investment. I enjoy listening to the radio so much more now and don't always have to put in a CD to get good sound. I posted a review previously but wanted to add more since I've been enjoying this product for nearly 2 years. The reliability thus far has been excellent as well.

Clear, clean reception. Excellent selectivity in a crowded FM market. Great sounding.

No preset buttons, but who needs them.

In the very tightly packed Boston-Providence market, pulling in stations can be a challenge. With the FT101A it's easy!Being able to detune a station is important for clean reception. I've used both an ST-2 whip antenna and a rotatable roof antenna each offered suberb performance.
And, after drawing in all of those stations, the sound is very musical,not the flat one-dimensional sound of many tuners. This tuner is well-built and offers a lot of value for the money.

Similar Products Used:

Yamaha, Nikko

First, let me say that having a tuner is a great way of hearing all kinds of music. In Canada,we have public radio called CBC 1 and CBC 2. CBC 2 is FM stereo playing mostly classical music, but also jazz and some new music. The Magnum Dynalab is not expensive; I paid about $700. Cdn. Sonically, it has an open, smooth, musical quality. I purchased my unit via mail order, but I had heard earlier incarnations of the player. I live close to the transmission source so signal is not a problem. The unit took a while to break in, 100 hours or so, but the sound was quite good to start with. There are better sounding tuners, including models from Magnum-Dynalab, but the 101A is wonderful and a real bargain to boot.

I have tried various tuners both at dealers and at home and the one that sounds like REAL,LIVE MUSIC is the Magnum Etude it actually has a true sounstage and that musicality that is missing in most if not all tuners available today.

Incredible tuner and well worth the money. Finally I can enjoy the radio in my home as much as I have in my car. The sound quality even surpases that of my CD player. Some say $850 is a lot for a tuner but actually I've been saving money on purchasing CD's because I enjoy the variety I can get for free on the radio.
kayla

This is one fantastic tuner. It provides incredible depth to the soundstage and unsurpassed dynamic range. The analog tuning (with digital readout) is easy, but there are no presets as on the cheaper FT-11. Best audio quality I've heard in a tuner. Build quality is very good, but not great (get the Etude if you want great build quality). I give it a solid 4 1/2, but rounding up it gets a 5.

I never intended to own a tuner this expensive...after all it's "only" FM (so I thought). Worked a trade for a mint used one...WOW. I've owned some good FM tuners before (my old Sansui TU 7700 comes to mind), this puts 'em all to shame. You tend to hear 1st thing what a component is doing right. 1st thing I thought was "How come my CD player doesn't sound this transparent?" Clear, grain free, dynamic...it just sounds like live music, like I wish my CD player did. Transients explode from an inky, inky black background (if the station is transmitting a good signal) with a crystalline, airy treble. It's got two sets of output jacks-low and high output. If you've got an input impedance of 50Kohm
or greater, and about 20db of gain (or else a VERY quiet preamp), use the low
outputs-significantly more transparent than the already excellent hi outputs.
Summary:This front end will not be your weak link unless you have some VERY
expensive source components. Everyone should at least hear one, to hear how good FM can be. I can't imagine anyone needing better. This is last FM tuner I'll ever need.

This is a fantastic tuner. I especially enjoy the flywheel analog tuning, analog meters to center on the frequency, and the mono/stereo feature which helps with pulling in that local college jazz station. Build quality is excellent, especially for anything near its price. No frills. Even with a cheap radio shack antenna it sounds great.
And the music comes through with excellent depth, image, and true sound. Does not sound like the card-board FM we're all used to hearing.

One more: call magnum dynalab and they'll tel you that they look after their products for life s long as you do not modify its internal components.

weak or crowded signals, low noise audio

no included remote or presets

I got this to go with a second system, but I've been
able to spend a week a/b'ing it against my Adcom (gtp-600)
tuner/preamp with an aps-13 outdoor antenna.
I consistantly get a decent stereo signal from an indie
station 150 miles away despite a local station on the
adjacent channel. With the Adcom you can't even tell
the weaker station is there. I've gotten a useable mono
signal from Philadelphia (>200 miles, over the Catskill
mountains.)
The "thwp-thwp-thwp" sound you get tuning across the
band is a retro-trip lost in a world of digital tuners
with presets and muted seek tuning. This tuner has a lot
of tactile and visual aesthetic value.
The S/N ratio is very good. This leads to the only annoyance I found. With a dipole antenna I almost always
get a little bit of multipath distortion, worse with strong signals, which might get lost in the background hiss of a "mortal" reciever. A directional antenna (or a house without foil-faced insulation!) cleans this up.

Similar Products Used:

Adcom, Marantz