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Well, Nerone, the differences between any tuners would greatly vary with signal, not even with the strength of signal but rather with the specific location and surrounding of a given station.  To make the things conceptually right it would be necessary to make built/pick a custom tuner with own set of topological decisions for each station and each recipient location. I kind of slowly move to thin direction as I have only 3 stations that I ever worry, WCRBH, WGBH and WHRB. The “weak signal” is not a sufficient characteristic in my view, I would rather use a phrase the “complexity of signal”, I am sure you know what I mean.

Regarding the tube tuner vs. SS tuner. It is more complex and I do not think that it is only due to “week signals”. Many best tube tuners were made what there were no demands for contemporary high quality of sound and contemporary complexity of FM broadcasting. They have very crappie multiplex decoders, extremely horrible output stages, no post-detection filtration, very high noise, limited IR bandwidth, difficulties to deal with overload and many other might that might be improved. The SS tuners are juts “newer” and it is in a way more useable. I certainly do not want to pass myself as some kind of expect or tube tuner or tuners generally. I am very rational person and try to abbey empirical reasons.

If tube tuners are “better” (and the might be as tubes have lower inner-modulation in RF) then why do not get the most evolved tube tuner and see what happen. I took REL and looking at the tube tuners schematics any other tubers was made to brainlessly imitate the way in which REL was designed. Pay attention: my REL has no “sound” as it has only a front- end, IR, limiter and detector. The audio sound it born right after detector – everything before is RF. The sound after detector is IC buffers and sent to external MPX decoder. The same MPX decoder is driven also from SS turner.

So, I think the environment I set up is methodologically honest framework to evaluate the Tube vs. SS debate – we do not compare the output stages of multiplex decoders.  Furthermore, I have the composite signal from SS and tube tuner match marched to a fraction of db and I have an ability to flip the MPX decoder’s input and here the instant difference. From my currant view the tube tuners (at least my tube tuner) is the deep ass.  The SS tuners have some conics advantage and they are way quieter. At this moment I  would not even to talk about sound as my tube tuner has too high own noise that pretty much disqualifies it from any further consideration. I have my REL to review by a tuner serving technician but he did not address the noise.  It is not the noise from air but the internal noise. I have bought a crystal oscillator and drove via attenuator my tuners to see what external nose my tuners have. To my astonishment the Sansui TU-1X show 78dB signals to noise ratio – that is beyond any expectations in my view. Pay attention – this is not the bogus numbers from add booklets but the actual number that I measured with my scope. My “worse” Rohde & Schwarz showed 75dB but slightly more noise texture of noise – with Sansui is it a pure white noise but the Schwarz has some harmonics. (I did not measure my “better” Rohde & Schwarz).  With 78dB signals to noise ratio I have silence from speaker. With REL I have an ocean of MF noises with no modulation in antenna – who can listen it and who cares how it sound with the signal? I wonder how quiet your tube tuners sound. Flip them to Mono, take a headphone on and listen some newscast “from studio”. Do you have absolutely back background with no noise of any kind between the words? If you do then it is the problem of my REL and I need to look more on it. Otherwise it how the tube tuners sound - with noise - and I do not like it.

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