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Harman Kardon TU940
Looking back on my notes from a few years of tuners, this is one of the finer examples
A bit of a big and bulky affair we have here, but that's a deliberate choice by Harman Kardon - the insides as usual hardly begin to justify it. In fact the heart of this tuner is based on pretty much the same selection of integrated circuits that can be found in the majority of contemporary tuners, and none the worse for that since many of them work very well.
The radio-frequency front end is one I don't recall seeing before, and perhaps that's responsible for an early brownie point scored by the TU940. During initial checking to make sure the tuners all at least worked a bit, on a very interference-prone Friday night, I found that this one gave distinctly better rejection of pirate stations than the other two FM tuners. That, frankly, is welcome news to any big city dweller.
The roll-call of features is entirely par for the course: FM and AM reception, 30 presets, RDS, switchable IF bandwidth and optional connection to a Harman Kardon system for integrated remote control. There's a usefully scaled signal-strength meter and, if you can't be doing with searching out stations, the tuner will scan the FM band and load stations into memory for you. This bit of kit is well built and easy to use.
Sound quality
It also sounds good. In fact I'd have to say that although it's only officially being compared with two other FM tuners here, looking back on my notes from a few years of tuners this is one of the finer examples.
Not only does it work well when the RF signal is less than perfect, under good reception conditions it produces a clear, hearty and involving sound. With large-scale classical works on Radio 3 it rides the dynamics like an expert surfer, maintaining a better grip on the detail in loud passages than most of its competitors and keeping noise low when the music pauses for a second or two.
It has a natural tone on speech programmes (though I can't resist a swipe at the way so many radio stations put out badly mutilated speech, both bassy and spitty - try Radio 4 drama to hear how it can be done). Lively pop, rock and jazz benefit from the strong but not over-emphasised bass and taut midrange. There is still a little roughness in the treble, and feeding the tuner from a CD player and FM test generator showed up a slight loss of precision and polish, but there was always a good degree of involvement and life.
Even stereo image depth, which is always an early casualty in the chain of FM broadcasting and receiving, was a passable imitation of the original. The only slightly bothersome aspect was a touch of coloration on bright instruments like trumpet, which seemed to develop just a hint of 'quack' on some notes.
I'm starting to split hairs there, though. Results are really among the best I've heard, including those from considerably dearer models.
Conclusion
With the added bonus of better-than-average AM reception too, and a respectable bill of health from the lab bench (if Harman Kardon could suppress the pilot tone just a little bit better it would be no bad thing: young listeners may be aware of it from time to time) this tuner looks like no-brainer of a choice. And the best bit - it's cheap too! Best Buy.
FEATURES
AM and FM reception, 30 presets, RDS, switchable IF bandwidth, optional connection to a Harman Kardon system for integrated remote control, signal-strength meter.