FM Tuner Reviews

The Marantz ST-74 tuner, reviewed in Vol.8 No.7, was described as having "butter-and-marmalade appearance and AM performance, but dry-toast FM." The latest offering from Marantz, the ST551 (footnote 1), has not quite as sweet AM or appearance, but its more palatable FM makes it one of the best-sounding tuners encountered. It doesn't lack features either—remote control of manual tuning, scan, band selection, and presets—all at a fairly low price.

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines "myriad," derived from a Greek word meaning "ten thousand," as "a very great number of persons or things." British and unabashedly ambitious, Myryad Systems has set itself myriad design goals for its M-series stereo components: audiophile performance, real-world pricing, convenience, circuit simplicity, common remote-control function, and physical beauty.

When I first learned that Meridian had co-badged, with Ferrari, a $3000 table radio, I was tempted to cynically dismiss it as a marketing gimmick—an attempt by the audio manufacturer to leverage the brand loyalty of the Italian automaker to its own highly developed industrial designs. The problem was, that required that I dismiss everything I knew about Meridian and its singular head designer, Bob">http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/906bob">Bob Stuart.