“I’ve been an FM radio listener almost all my life, and worked in it as a programmer and personality for close to half of my 60 years or so. In my teens I had a Blonder-Tongue tuner with a cranky dial cord that would receive the few Toronto stations up and running in the late 50s. These included CFRB-FM (later to become CKFM, which became the City’s highest rated FM voice in the 70s and early 80s, and where Audio Ideas, my radio show, began in November of 1973 and ran until 1986)…”

“This is a tuner that surprised in its sensitivity and selectivity after reviewing hundreds of tuners over the years. The Hitachi FT-4000, in good-to-excellent reception conditions, pulled in 50 stations on our 300-ohm Lindsay double-dipole antenna, and 52 on our small yagi high-mounted directional antenna on the tower, but its stereo sensitivity was somewhat below the better high end tuners (to come, about 40 models in all)…”

“These three classic recorders epitomize the European approach to high quality portable recording, and all have been used extensively as professional tools, each finding its level of quality and individual expertise. The Nagra has been the acknowledged giant of the film business where high audio quality is concerned, and its ruggedness and reliability are legend, no matter what the temperature or other weather conditions. All this came at a considerable cost in its heyday, a fully tricked out IV-S running to 6 or 7 thousand dollars. And that time period lasted longer than that of any other portable professional recorder except the Uher, and rivaled that of the great studio Studer and Ampex machines.”