Review in STEREO magazine (Germany), Issue March 2007
Accuphase DDS FM Stereo Tuner T-1000

FM Broadcast With Digital Quality
by Uwe Kirbach

Accuphase has long ago signed up to the hall of fame for making brilliant FMtuners. The new T-1000, which is to process analogue radio waves in the digitaldomain, can be considered another milestone.
FM broadcast? Well, for most people this means flat sound, silly commercials
and often a noisy, sometimes sizzling reception. Perhaps just good enough for pipedmusic in the background, drowning out other noisy sources or merely for havingsome company whilst doing some lonesome work at the PC. On the other hand,when a couple of years ago that nice little, retro-designed Tivoli radio hit the market
many of us could experience anew what FM broadcast can also be, namely a goodand round sounding medium to entertain you 24 hours a day, provided one has tuned
to the right stations.
And there were those notorious discussions and statements about FM
broadcast eventually being substituted by digital radio. But what has really happened
since? The digital satellite radio DSR has been switched off and Astra Digital Radio
will be history as soon as the last analogue TV stations have ceased theirtransmissions. To this date DAB is lingering about with more or less poor sound andhardly any programme variety. In Sweden they already stopped further tests withDAB because of its typical shortcomings. To sum up: the threat of having FM
broadcast also switched off in this country by the year 2010 has become
meaningless in the meantime, and it's an open secret for insiders of Bavaria
Broadcast Corporation that the short- and medium-term plans concerning DAB havefailed and therefore terminating FM broadcast is a very long way off.
This is one reason why it can still be worthwhile to devote oneself to a really
good FM tuner as it will certainly not become obsolete in the future. The other reason
is most likely known by all those who already had their "initial great radio experience",i.e. live-broadcast and uncompressed programmes of culture and classic music being
offered by nearly all radio stations under public law. A top-notch tuner would in any
case allow you to be aurally transported to the venue of sonic origin, like only thebest analogue turntables and digital players could do that. In this respect a goodtuner may also be the most reasonable source in a high-end audio chain. Just thinkof it: all of the big radio stations are equipped with superb, carefully maintained
technology, such as microphones, mixing consoles and tape recorders, whereby thelatter are regularly fed with wonderful tape recordings from huge archives. And not toforget the transmission facilities which are actually providing a direct line so to speak
via your antenna into your favourite radio stations respectively their studios.

It may have become evident in the meantime that a tuner fan is writing here.
Well, gentle readers, I have indeed become one since I found out as a young boy
how interesting it was to listen to the sounds from a small transistor radio under thequilt whilst my parents thought I was fast asleep. Today I have a classic tuner
installed in every room, including an Accuphase T-106, by the way. In my large
listening room there is a recently refurbished, unsurpassed Marantz 10B at it's sonicbest. Be warned however because the 10B is oh so rare, in particular if you want toacquire one that's suitable for the German broadcast network and which has its
components and valves (the latter very difficult to find anyway!) still working well, andlast but not least, to find someone who is an expert in tuning and aligning this highly
complex beauty.
However of all the tuners I have only the Marantz 10B works optimally with mybig 12-bar roof antenna as well as with the frequency chaos I get out of the wall fromKabel Deutschland. I assume that for processing the ultimate signals coming byantenna from, say, a live transmission from Bavaria Broadcast, the output stages ofall other tuners in my collection are simply not good enough. And they all react quitesensitive to the signal from the cable by increased noise, crackling and chirping.
Then came the Accuphase T-1000 and, except for the Marantz, gave my othermanorial tuners a run for their money. Compared to its substantial, stable sonicpicture the others sounded thin and quite unbalanced with respect to sound colours.
Only the Sansui TU-9900 could catch up as far as spatial presence was concernedand eventually could convey that strong feeling of being there when listening to FM
radio and live broadcast. Although I was rather sceptic in the beginning as to whether
the internal conversion and digital output of the T-1000 is a good idea for radio
signals, I proceeded to connect it to several D/A converters. The first two I tried
seemed to confirm my prejudice, as the rendered sound was rather tattered andunbalanced by sound colours when compared to the analogue output of the newAccuphase tuner. But then it was the Jadis-DAC JS-1 Mk III to take care of theconversion and processing the signals for my Kondo pre-amplifier.
Now, this very moment will forever stay in my memory because it has been
messing up my aural experiences gathered over decades. I could hear orchestralmusic with such an incredible resolution I would never have thought possible, evenwith good FM transmission! The new Accuphase tuner is able to deliver via its digital
output an increased directness and openness, a musical high drama and dynamic
explosiveness, a fascinating soundstage focus as well as an incredibly precise view
onto the back rows of a large orchestra. Within minutes I had to reconsider all myconvictions: no, the high-frequency rendition of an orchestra is not audibly restrictedby FM's upper frequency limit between 15 und 16 kHz. No, even the hardtransmission cut-off by the pilot tone at 19 kHz does not automatically cause phaseproblems which are likely to smear or restrict spatial rendition and soundstage. And
yes, I'm now realising that even the most complex music can be completelytransmitted by FM.
As luck would have it, this flood of perception came over me when I waslistening to a well-known recording, which however was absolutely not corresponding
with my excitement and feelings on the new sonic experience: Dietrich FischerDieskau with his sonorous baritone gave an interpretation of Karl Amadeus
Hartmann's singing scenes according to the words of "Sodom and Gomorrha"whereby Rafael Kubelik conducted the Symphony Orchestra of Bavaria Broadcast
Corporation. Therefore, please forgive me my association that the Accuphase T-1000
with at least its digital front end has opened a new chapter in tuner technology, while
I wouldn't care much if conventional tuner technology would also fall together with
Sodom and Gomorrha…..
The question now is if "digitalisation" in a tuner can offer other advantages still,apart from the option "digital out"? Yes, certainly, because the digital domain allows
to cut the pilot tone completely off without the need of conventional filters including
their phasing problems and other shortcomings. For this reason the T-1000 can fully
use the entire FM transmission range without having to deal with phase errors
effecting the audible range. By the way, the digital output has still got anotherinvaluable advantage at hand. Owing to the lack of suitable recording formats it was
not easy in recent years to have radio transmissions recorded at the highest quality
level. Well, the new Accuphase makes this possible now in by-passing the analogue
output stage and sending the signal directly into a digital recorder or onto the harddisk in your PC.
In order to get the pilot tone, a big "tuner-troublemaker", under better control in
the T-1000, Accuphase has employed a proprietary trick dubbed "Pilot Tone DirectSynthesis" (DS-DC). This ingenious circuitry detects the pilot tone even in a very
weak state, whereupon it is always generated anew by the DSP arithmetic. This
results in an optimal channel separation and very low noise in particular when thepilot tone is fading or received at low level. In conventional applications the pilot tone
is processed by a PLL circuitry with all the disadvantages of feedback loops.
By experiment the T-1000 could indeed extract a very clean music signal withminute noise from several stations received at medium-strong input levels. On theother hand it doesn't like any of those weak stations which are eventually sacrificed infavour of sonic purism. This is clearly visible when one has a closer look at theconstruction of the super heterodyne amplifier. None of the usual switches for
adjacent station separation has been realised here, yet this can lead to strong
distortions when either very weak stations or strong, complex frequency overlays arebeing received.
This is why this new sonic genius from Accuphase could not really cope withthe frequency blend delivered by Kabel Deutschland to my flat, whereupon our editor
in chief, Matthias Böde, reported that at his place the T-1000 received cablefrequencies without problems and with them was sonically almost surpassing hisMetric tuner by Restek. No question, the T-1000 prefers to be hooked up to a realantenna and with that will sound sonically outstanding up to a certain point: If it
doesn't like the incoming signal it would react like any other digital circuitry, namely towave good bye to brilliant sound, at least for the time being. For any such cases
Accuphase has provided two rather traditional facilities: one would enable you to
manually fine-adjust and optimise the reception frequency in tiny steps of 10 kHz if
two adjacent stations are interfering with each other. In some situations a certain
offset-tuning may even result in a better sonic rendition and this is something that
actually cannot be realised in synthesiser-tuners. The other one is a button for stereo
noise filtering which works very well and is audibly less damaging to even weaker
stereo signals than the noise filters in conventional tuners.

In view of all this I personally believe that Accuphase's engineering department has
made the right decision: those who are eventually going to acquire a new
benchmarking tuner would rather afford the expenses for an antenna service or for
exchanging the cable outlet than complying to any compromise and hence lesssound quality.
In the long history of outstanding Accuphase tuners the T-1000 is by far themost significant development. It already sounds exemplarily powerful and balanced
from its antenna input to analogue out, whereby its digital output allows the best
possible recordings. And in combination with a Super-DAC the T-1000 can yield asound quality from FM radio I had never heard before.