Saturday, March 12, 2011

Quad FM-3 (2nd unit)

The FM-3 is a simplistic looking FM only tuner which accompanies the Quad 33 and 303.

Front
Even so do not be deceived by the simplistic looks. It's a very nice sounding FM tuner and easily betters my Sansui TU-D99X (rated at no#30 at FMTUNERINFO). I would dare say it cames pretty close to the performance of my Meridian 201 - a very nice tuner as well.

Rear view
Power is provided via Bulgin plug and output via the British traditional socket e.g 5-pin DIN. Aerial can be connected via a Quad 3-pin connector or the more popular 75ohm aerial socket.

There is an adjust for fine tuning but I hardly use it. It maybe useful when tuning for distant or weak stations.

Top

After recapping the PSU filters, I changed some of the poly(s) with Wima(s). There were minor improvements, most noticable are the headroom improvement and clearity of the reproduction.

Please note I did not perform any additional changes on my 1st FM3 (soon to came), except to replace the 3 electrolytic caps.  My 1st FM3 has gold-plated pins on the MPX IC whilst the 2nd does not.

2 comments:

  1. I'm just debating whether to change the electrolytics on my Quad FM3 as there is a little hiss coming from one of the speakers whenever it's in use.I have the caps from Dada. How easy is it to do?

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