Sony XDRF1HD HD Radio Tuner by Sony
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Our Price: $499.99 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of Sony XDRF1HD HD Radio Tuner
Digital camera Review: An average tuner - don't believe the hype
Summary: 3 Stars
The buzz about this tuner from the ham and amateur radio crowd promised superior sensitivity and sound quality. We receive FM over a mountain top from stations in Baltimore and Washington DC about 100 miles away. Our conventional tuner, an old Scott receiver from the early 1970's with a folded dipole antenna, is our reference tuner. The Scott receives many Baltimore and DC stations but they're very noisy. So we bought this SOA Sony tuner hoping it would receive the distant stations (with its dipole) without the noise. We also hoped that the stations it did receive would sound better than the Scott. We were very disappointed. The Sony and Scott had identical performance. We could hear no difference between them. The Sony was just as noisy as the Scott, could not pull in any additional stations, and its sound quality was indistinguishable from the Scott. In short the Sony XDRF1HD is an average tuner with average sound. I'm sorry we didn't spend the $100 the Sony cost us on a directional antenna for the Scott. I believe that would have been money better spent.Digital camera Review: An excellent product and the price is right.
Summary: 5 Stars
My husband loves it! He says it is the best and only one to get in that price range.Digital camera Review: Analog Only
Summary: 3 Stars
Great, inexpensive, technologically up to date analog tuner for the price. HOWEVER, HD "Digital" radio is a hoax foisted upon the unsuspecting public. It is highly compressed and far inferior in sound quality to analog. (a quick check is to listen to the stereo separation, much compressed in HD or modify the tuner with a simple switch to allow for realtime analog/HD switching, find it on the internet, compare the sound quality...try it) "CD like" is a overly used marketing term that the government should investigate. HD radio is an industry ploy to shoe-horn in more stations in the allotted frequency spectrum thus potentially allowing more advertising revenue. That is not a bad thing if we were provided with superior sound...and HD does NOT do this.Digital camera Review: Backlight died after 5 months
Summary: 2 Stars
Works great, but back-light started getting dimmer and dimmer after warranty (90 day labor) was up. Now back-light is almost completely dead. Screen is not easily readable without back-lighting. Hopefully this is the only problem, and the rest of the tuner will not die at a later time.Digital camera Review: Best Buy
Summary: 4 Stars
It has excellent recetion on analog and HD FM. The adjacent channel electivity enables me to hear weak stations next to strong local ones. Good FM sound, analog or HD.
Four faults: Analog AM is telephone quality. No "stay in analog" button. Frequency settings aren't backed up by a battery. RDS display doesn't capture all the text info, i.e. the "now playing" scrolling text.
It's only [...], so these faults are excusable.