Denon TU-580RD Tuner

The tuner is made in the style of "slim-line", it is very slim, i.e. small in height but normally of big sizes in plan and stands on the four thick legs with gold rims. The display of average sizes is located to the left, rectangular keys and control buttons are put in the right part of the front panel, very large and handy setting keys are especially noticeable. Visually they seem to balance the side location of the display and the design of tuner seems to be beautiful and pleasant at the day time. Unfortunately, this impression disappears in the dark: all right part with non-highlighted buttons seems to be a solid black mass. Key pressing is light, move is very little but the pressing fixation is clear with a quiet click. The matrix display shows the frequency rate and text information by numbers and letters drawn of blue points, the inscription "stereo" at the same time shines redly and this beautifies and adds variety to the display screen. A lot of official information is also indicated on the display for example the indicator of pass bandwidth (wide-narrow) and signal meter in the form of a line from seven blue dots. This function is extremely useful and allows you to orient optimally the antenna. By the way, the tuner is equipped with dipole VHF and frame medium-wave antenna mounted on the back wall. The tuner operates in the ranges of VHF and hectometric waves, the frequencies of 30 stations in three memory banks (A,B,C) with 10 frequencies in each can be read in the memory. Self-programming is not provided, you can't scan the programmed frequencies (presets) from the front panel but can with a help of the remote control. At the presence of interference you can turn on the attenuator, weakening high-frequency signal, using the remote control.It helps in some cases. The tuner is equipped with the decoder of RDS system and in the case of setting on the frequency of radio station, being equipped with the same system, the name of station or type of transmitted program is indicated on the display. You can choose the desired type of program, scrolling through the list of 15 nameson the display and the tuner will automatically find it. The measurements showed quite good tuner's parameters in both VHF and medium-frequency range. AM-tract of the tuner has a record selectivity at quite high sensitivity. The real selectivity exceeds 40 dB and parasitic receiving channels are suppressed even more. The lower adjacent-channel selectivitymeaning is explained by the desire of the developers to expand the pass band in order to somehow approach the sound quality on MF to the sound quality on VHF. It is not always successful and the listening of medium-wave air at both the external and the accompanying frame antennas showed quite much noise, background and interference and there were so many noises with external antenna that we wanted to disconnectit as quickly as possible! However at the receiving on the frame antenna of local and powerful stations the sound was not bad. VHF receiving was just perfect; bandwidth reduction allows receiving the weakest stations next to strong ones albeit with a bit worse quality and also reducing noise level on weak stations. Unfortunately, small distortions, quite typical at VHF-receiving, were audible sometimes on fizzles. This didn't allow giving a high score to the device's sounding. In General, the score turned out to be good.