Having owned my Technics Digital Tuner for over a year now, I am extremely happy with the money I spent. I bought it as soon as I saw it as I love music. I have never been one for reading endless instruction booklets, so I just got it out of the box and set it up on my stereo. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be so I had to have a quick scoot at the manual for the little extra features. It has a very simple layout, so even an idiot like myself can use it!!! The big button on the right is for both tuning and for flicking through the different radio stations once you have found a frequency that has radio stations broadcasting on it. The small button next to this one is used to flick through all the stations you have saved into the memory, and the other small button is used to search through the various descriptions of the radio station you are currently listening to. The range of descriptions of radio stations includes the normal things like the type of music they play right through to religion. By flicking the bottom screen down you access a second menu to choose from. This is where you can store your favourite stations, select, auto or manual tuning, view signal strength and much more on top. To store a radio station all you have to do is tune into the station you so desire and press the memory button. This will bring up a number on the display. If the number has a little star next to it then you already have a radio station stored in this slot. By turning the preset button it will scroll through the preset numbers. Once you have found the slot that you want to store it on you just press the memory button again. By pressing the menu button you can access your signal strength, tuning blocks and announcements. To scroll through the submenus you just have to press - or +. The signal strength is shown by a bar. The bar consists of 12 blocks. Obviously, the higher the strength
, the better the broadcast. However, even when you only have 2 or 3 blocks on the signal strength, you can still receive the radio stations, interruption free! To find your optimum signal strength you have to mve the aerial wire about a bit. With the original aerials for FM radios, the best way was to stick it to the wall in a t shape. With this I have found that this is not necessarily the best. Mine is not even stretched out to receive optimum reception! The tuning step option brings you the option of block tuning or tuning through 16Khz steps. Although the block tuning is much quicker, it does miss out radio stations. It will pick up the large digital networks such as BBC, and Digital One, but you will need to use the 16Khz tunindg step if you want to pick a lot of stations up. Although this can be a tedious task, it can also be well worth it. Some people only get about 15 stations. On mine I have managed to find about 40 by using the 16Khz steps. The announcement part of the menu gives two choices. You can set the language, with the default being English, and you can search through the different announcement types. To do this you simply press menu and then enter, as it is the first choice in the menu facility. This will then show you the word ALARM. By scrolling through you will see the words traffic, travel, warning, news, weather, event, special, radio inf, sports and finance. By selecting any of these you can set up your beautiful machine to give you regular updates on any of these subjects. You can select as many to be switched on as you want, and can leave them on permanently. I, myself, choose never to use these, but to the right person they can be invaluable. Those are all the features of the digital tuner, but there is one thing I have not yet commented on. That is the appearance. It is very compact and looks brilliant. I saw a few digital tuners when i was looking to buy, but none of them could beat the look
s of the Technics. The other thing that swayed me towards pulling some more money out of my pocket to get this one rather than any other was Technics' supreme reputation. This digital tuner lives up to that reputation. I was reading a site on these gadgets, and i noticed that it mentioned that the government was going to do away with the old analogue ones. Each month they grant digital broadcast licences to local radio stations, so the network is growing and developing all of the time. It will be a few years yet before all of the radio stations are digital, so you don't have to worry about your analogue one being switched off yet. Digital radio has been around for years, it has just never taken off. Now, it is finally starting o become popular. I do not know anybody who owns one of these machines, but everyone who has seen and heard mine thinks it is absolutely brilliant. Anybody who is thinking of buying a digital tuner, go for it. They are the best thing since sliced bread. And to anybody who is not thinking about buying one, WHY???
The model is very basic in its design with only a couple of dials on the front. One of the dials flix thru the number of mutiplexes available whilst the other is used to flick thru the various music stations. The sound from these is perfect every time. The display on the front shows what station you are on in bold text. The tunner can be set up so that there are regular breaks for weather or traffic conditions. There is a traditional analouge tuner also built in which I dont really see the point of. The remote is compact and user friendly and fits quiet nicely in the palm of your hand. The main drawback is the price and that you can not store your favourites a basic error.
After recently purchasing a new seperates system, I thought that digital radio would be the next innovation and so I paid the extra £35 to get this unit. I have to say that digital radio had definately got to improve considerably because at the moment, I can recieve 4 mainstream stations, a few long range ones, and the rest are mainly one-off broadcasts and foreign channels. Although the technology is excellent and reception is second to none, until other stations adapt to this medium, digital is just an added extra. I have no faults at all with this unit and hope that it serves me well in the future.