I think if I came across a NAT01 for not silly money I might seriously consider it
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Fair question - by better - I suppose preference sound wise? Well for me the Chord DAVE decoding 16 bit PCM of certain digital albums playing into Empyrean headphones comes top. Give me certain choral recordings - and they are spine tingling on the DAVE. Also Johnny Cash prison albums just are ridiculously incredible - you can feel the vibe from the prisonser audience.
However I do like the bandwidth contained sound of stereo FM as well as its limited dynamics and that can play well in room loud speaker setups - perhaps less so with very revealing planar headphones. I find FM radio can sound very enjoyable, clear and detailed; electronic/EDM, rock, jazz, blues and country and orchestral - but it hasn’t always done it for me on intense immersive intimate listening - as too much of that necessary subtle low level info I suspect is discarded, as well as noise and imaging information lost in the stereo encoding / decoding that starts to become more noticeable on very low levels… its just a limitation of the technology, despite BBC Radio processing the analogue signal prior to digital encoding to compress signal levels (varies by content and station) to minimise this. It always amazes me that stereo on FM radio works as well as it does - as there is so much scope for errors and noise to creep in with the sum and difference encoding model.
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Excellent link and description Simon. An eye opener. Thanks.
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I think that FM works so well is because it’s better to have an professional DA converter close to the source and the analogue signal going to an analogue FM tuner, rather than stream digital to an consumer streamer DAC.
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Sure … like as I have said before … the tuner becomes part of some sort of convoluted digital reconstruction filter.
However all DACs are for ‘consumers’ whether they be for domestic enthusiast or professional markets… and in my experience there is not necessarily a huge amount of difference in SQ between them… the professional device will typically be more robust and support standardised professional interfaces, and may well offer a defined specific performance as opposed to the range of variability of presentations with domestic DACs.
I’m sure the entire fm transmission path could be convincingly modelled in software - then we could make any source sound like Radio 3. Or (!) Radio 1.
There’s no shortage of professional software to emulate all manner of old recording/etc equipment. Power supply sag on your mixing console? Sure - we have a plug-in for that…
I presume that BBC have som serious stuff compared to home hifi equipment.
The BBC have the equipment required to do the task at hand. If most of their listeners are happy / can’t tell the difference / don’t care, it’s good enough. It’s good, but not esoteric, and these days is usually off the shelf commercially available kit.
What they do have is good sound engineers with long experience who know what they are doing - which is why what you hear is (usually 
) consistently good / as expected for specific channels.
Sure i expect it is, as it [FM distribution network] is quite old now as well as using limited bandwidth non linear pulse code modulation, so will have highly likely been purpose built… but sound quality wise I think it would be interesting to compare, as technically the digital encoding used is inferior to the typical home DAC 44.1/16/2 LPCM DAC that is used these days… but within the constraints it has to work within it clearly sounds very good with many tuners… and when it was launched it was revolutionary… CD wasn’t even a twinkle in an eye… and as we know digital technology has moved on hugely in that time.
However the BBC uses modern and innovative digital technology for its other platform distribution networks… there was an interesting article on this published by the BBC R&D once… I’ll post a link if I can find it.
Not quite what I was thinking of, but this is an interesting list of engineering design and development blogs from the BBC whete the current development focuses are
Some people like the sound of valves when added somewhere in the chain. Aren’t they using gigantic vacuum tubes to pass on the signal at the transmitter station? Could be the reason why FM sound so good!
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I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the tandberg vs. the nat 05. Years ago I switched from a 3011 and later added the nat 05, which to me has an overly convoluted way of finding stations. Fortunately I use so few stations nowadays it barely matters. One of my other “interests” has been a good radio in different rooms. I’ve several zenith transoceanics (all solid state) and a braun t 1000 which, while not stereo make wonderful music in a room and both pull in an amazing number of stations.
At that stage the signal is FM encoded onto a RF carrier, and so the inherent ‘quality’ of the RF amplification becomes largely irrelevant to the modulated signal…ie the initially digitally to analogue decoded signal. FM transmitters can be a classic use case of pure Class B amplifiers which have significant distortion but greater efficiency (not saying the BBC transmitters use Class B), but when demodulated using an FM discriminator in a FM tuner the initial modulation signal can be accurately recovered largely irrelevant to the distortions added or the quality in the FM RF chain.
By contrast the quality of the RF chain in AM transmitters does have a direct bearing on the quality of the recovered AM signal.
Thank you for that detailed explanation. Still, I have no idea why some FM radio stations can sound so good!
Simply FM analogue transmission to an analogue FM tuner is better than streaming.
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Because some radio stations take care of their SQ and levels… and others don’t give a sh*t and that goes for web streaming radio as well.
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I knew you were a Russian spy!
I don´t think they use Magnum Dynalab ST2
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I’ve owned a number of great Tuners… Nakamichi ST-7, several Yamaha’s but the best were the Magnum Dynalab tuners
Yay! I had an ST-2 for years outside mounted on the side of a chimney! I also owned numerous Magnum Dynalab tuners. The Magnum Dynalab FT-101, the Etude . My last FM tuner and favorite was the Fanfare FT-1a…
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