Sangean HDT-1 HD Radio Component Tuner

Sangean HD Radio is an adequate addition to your audio component group. It does all that sangeen claims, however, for the price, it would be nice if it had a few more bells and whistles, like a sleep function, a turn on function, etc.

I bought two of these tuners to go into a multi-zone system, I needed something relatively cheap that would fit into the rack with the other components looks wise and would be good quality. After looking at some other tuners which I think are better I found they were more money than I could spend. The reviews for this seemed ok, so I decided to order them. I figured sound quality would be just fine because... Its not that hard to get decent sound out of a technology that has been around for decades. As soon as i hooked one of them up to see how it worked in my high end stereo I was immediatly struck by how muffled it sounded. Doing a direct comparison to my tuner which is a Sansui TU517 it is really obvious how poor this tuner is as far as sound quality goes.

Granted the sansui is one of the best tuners produced even if it is nearly 30 years old, You can usually pick one up for the price of this thing. The main problem with it is the lack of high frequency response. Everything sounds muffled and dull. There are nearly no highs at all.

Other than that the tuner works ok, big display is easy to read, easy to operate and picks up stations just fine, but I really cannot reccomend this for anyone who needs to have the sound quality there. It will be fine for my multi-room system but It would never be replacing the tuner in my high end system.

The local AM station simulcasts on one of its FM sister's subchannels so I got the tuner to get pre-sunrise reception of that. That worked fine.

It doesn't cost too much.

I notice on AM that sometimes, with a really good antenna system by the way, I can get AM HD at 500 miles range, around sunrise. It's pretty astounding when the usual distant radio noises are replaced by FM quality sound, albeit only for a few minutes at a time.

It's also interesting on AM in thunderstorms. The encoding manages to work right through some static crashes without indicating any hint of them being there, and not others.

I'm not an audiophile so have no opinion on the FM HD quality. The programming on FM is awful so I can't get worked up about it in any case.

The AM is sort of cute, but since its being there puts out god-awful amounts of noise on AM channels on either side of the station for non-HD receivers, it's very likely that the whole AM scheme will be abandoned sooner or later, or anyway it ought to be.

Product was delivered before promised time and checked out fine. I was surprised at the number of HD Radio stations available in the area. Why is this not being advertised?? In this area there are 24 hour classical, blues and hip hop stations with no ads. This is the way to listen to radio - no static and no ads. This tuner works great hooked up to my existing stereo and sounds much better than more expensive desk top models. I don't get why this is not catching on. One year ago I walked into the Bose store in downtown Chicago and the people working there had no idea what HD radio was. Oh well - eventually it will catch on and then these stations will have ads so enjoy it now!

I was skeptical about this tuner as you usually get what you pay for. I was pleasantly suprised to hear the great sound from this. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a moderate-cheap tuner. I started to look at tuners that cost 800+. I'm glad I found this one.