Sony XDRF1HD HD Radio Tuner

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.

The tuner displays a clock when turned off. When turned on it will scan for Analogue stations and/or Hibred Digital stations. A second click stop scanning and hold the station being sampled. Of course, if you already know the station number you may key it in with the remote control.

The fact is, even the Analogue stations sound better with this tuner than the tuner built into my Sony receiver. The difference is striking, but not as striking as the HD stations. Frankly, I am bowed over. I love this little tuner. Playing radio through my Pioneer speakers never sounded so great.

I connected the tuner to my receiver through the recorder jacks. Can you guess what I can do now?

Intuitive to use. With an external antenna this unit gets amazing reception. I know of no tuner that's more selective or more sensitive. HD Radio in southern new england offers a lot of alternative programming. I notice those stations that have a third side channel suffer in sound quality. That's a fault of the technology, not this radio. I've noticed that on the car radio too. I wish the display screen could turn off when the power is off. It's too bright and is a needless waste of power. Unit looses station memories if unplugged more than 12 hours. Overall highly recommended. Note there's a $50.00 coupon until 9/30/09. That's an amazing bargain.

I've had an HD Radio in my car for about 2 years. We are lucky to have several HD stations in the area and I've always enjoyed the better quality of sound. Now that I have this new Sony tuner, I can get the same quality at home, and it is fantastic. HD should become standard equipment in car receivers and home receivers.

This is, quite simply, the best FM tuner available for anything remotely near this price, possibly the best FM tuner, period. The HD-Radio aspect is a nice to have feature, but you can completely disregard it and this is still an amazing tuner.

Last weekend I spent a few hours going through the whole FM band. With the exception of neighbors to some of the local HD-Radio stations (which heavily pollute the neighboring channels), I was able to hear at least one station on every single channel. This was using just the included wire dipole antenna in my living room. I got very good, near-local signals from stations 50 miles away; marginal, but listenable signals from 120 miles away; and very fringe but understandable signals from 200 miles away.

Adjacent channel interference (again, with the exception of the local HD-Radio stations) is simply not an issue on this radio. No other FM radio I've tried, and I have several good ones, comes even close to this kind of performance. Sony has hit a grand slam with this unit.

The AM side is decent, but not outstanding. It will do a perfectly acceptable job with local stations. Deep fringe daytime reception is not its strong suit. It does require use of an external AM loop antenna (which is included) that must be placed at least a foot away from the tuner. The plus is that this makes it easy to rotate the antenna for best reception.

On the negative side for some, this is a "tuner" not a "radio". It does not contain an audio amplifier or speakers. It's designed to be plugged in to a stereo system. I run mine using some powered speakers designed for use with an iPod. (Adapter plug required)

Overall, I am very happy with the XDR-F1HD. I've recommended it to several friends, at least one of whom was so impressed he quickly ordered a second one.