[Radio Wrangler]

Christian's dropped us all right in it.

It's time to question what the root purpose is.

With a stereo audio frequency signal pair being sent to a small transmitter and then received in a tuner and played through a hifi system, you have a system for showing the tuner working as it would have been used, back in the day and in a good signal area. This might be the interest in it. You could show a visitor each of several tuners, classics in their own era, working on real, current programme material. You'd be able to hear differences between the different tuners, but the quality reaching the ears with the best tuners would not be up to the standard the same tuner would have produced in its era, in a good signal area. Certainly not with DAB, and to a lesser extent with an internet or digital video broadcast source. DVB-T quality is better than DAB.

If, alternatively, the aim is to listen to the music in the best possible quality, then you can say that extra stages and processes cannot be making what existed earlier up the chain any better, so you connect the audio from your DAB/Internet or other source direct to the hifi amplifier and switch the tuner off.

I have two good quality tuners. One Sony 'ES' model with a few tricks in it, and a carefully restored Revox that used to belong to the BBC as either one of their monitoring receivers, or as part of a re-broadcast backup. Not a bad credential for a tuner!

What they serve to do for me is to allow me to hear just how awful is the processing applied to all stations except Radio 3.

They're only turned on when there is some content I particularly want to hear, or Radio 3 when I want to hear something different.

They are nice objects to have and things of engineering interest in their own right, but I may be in the position of someone with a couple of racing cars in his garage, but no access to a racing circuit.

Whether or not this makes sense is a matter of opinion, but it's my choice and my freedom.

David