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Author: Rod Easdown |
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Plum Audio has gone back to basics with its no-frills digital tuner and the simplicity is a joy to behold.
IT'S A DAB+ digital radio tuner from a little Australian company called MSML, an acronym for Music Saved My Life. And the great strength of the Plum Audio tuner is that it doesn't try to be anything it's not.
It's a dead simple little device. I had it going within two minutes of opening the box and I'm in love with it.
The issue with digital radio receivers is that if you just want to listen to the radio, you either have to buy a stand-alone radio or pay for a tuner with a whole lot of features you don't need.
If you buy one of the simple stand-alone radios, you're up for about $100 to $150 for a unit that, for all of the purity of the digital signal, only sounds as good as the little speaker installed in it. These are invariably modest and their musical fidelity is hardly impressive.
If you go for a digital tuner for your existing stereo, you're looking at about $500 or more and you get a whole lot of features you may never use, like a computer link to access internet radio and media streaming.
Excuse me; I just want to listen to the gentle classical music station I like through my stereo system, with the ability to hunt around for the footy scores from time to time. Plum Audio's DAB+ tuner does exactly this. Nothing more. And because of this, it's just $175.
Let me take you through the set-up in its entirety. Against most other digital tuners, it's almost too simple to believe.
Take the tuner out of the box and use the supplied RCA cord to connect it to a spare input on the back of your amplifier. Now, plug the supplied cable aerial into the tuner and hang it up somewhere (with digital, a vertical aerial works better than a horizontal one). Finally, plug the power pack into a wall socket.
You'll see the tuner scan for stations. It takes a few seconds. Then it will tell you how many stations it has found and display one of them. Use the neat little remote control (a battery is supplied for it) to step through them until you find the station you want and press enter just as you do with a DVD player.
Voila. Beautiful music is coming out of your stereo at full digital-broadcast quality, allowing your amp and speakers to make the most of it. Simple or what?
The tuner has a two-line display and while the top line shows the station you're tuned to, the bottom line can be altered to show the signal strength, time and date or the message being transmitted by the station, which, in the case of the one I was listening to, was the current weather forecast.
A status light under the display glows blue when the tuner is on, red when it's off.
You can set your favourite stations as presets. Nine are available and storing them is as easy as holding down the relevant preset button for four seconds. If digital reception is dodgy, the tuner also picks up conventional FM band stations.
Here's a good idea; it has a volume control, handy with older or audiophile amplifiers that don't have a remote. Another nice point with this is the provision of a mute button.
The accompanying instruction book is concise, comprehensive and easy to follow.
The tuner itself is compact, about 15 centimetres wide by seven centimetres high, with a depth of 13 centimetres, allowing for the plugs sticking out the back. This means it sits nicely on top of the stereo or can be placed independent of it. And its appearance is entirely inoffensive. Actually, I liked it.
The remote is about the size of a business card and dead easy to mislay, a point of concern, given the tuner can't be operated without it. It takes a single CR2025 battery that's almost exactly the same size as a 5? coin. These are long-lasting but you'll only find them at specialist electronics stores.
It's interesting to note that most stereo systems being sold in Australia still don't have a digital radio tuner built in.
"This is a year after the introduction of digital broadcasting," MSML managing director Anthony Notaras says.
"There are hundreds of thousands of hi-fi systems in Australian homes and only a small number of them can access digital radio."
The Plum Audio tuner delivers on its promise very effectively. Given its simplicity and value and its excellent user-friendliness, it's thoroughly recommended. And if you want a tuner with all the fruit salad, the company has one of those too, for $399.