THE NAD 4300 AM/FM TUNER

Mike Bugaj

The summer of 2009 was a good summer for finding tuners. A few weeks after finding a NAD 4155 at a local flea market, I found this NAD 4300 tuner sitting on a pile of electronic equipment outside at the Pioneer Valley Flea Market in Holyoke, MA. This is another flea market that has a good amount of TVs and stereo equipment inside, for some reason. This tuner cost me $20 this time. It looked interesting, so I bought it. The tuning dial caught my attention. I turned it on and found it worked.

Selectivity, as usual, was atrocious. So, once again I took off the cover


This tuner is a more expensive tuner than the 4155 was. There were two filters on the main board (the area in black), but those filters were covered with another board with four or five more filters. The setup reminded me of the McVey filter board with a bunch of filters cascaded to really narrow the bandwidth of the tuner in narrow mode. The radio does have a wide/narrow IF button which did NOT do much of anything as far as I could tell. So, being the butcher that I am, I took it out, which just left me a radio with two filters. I put a filter in place of the board which netted me three 150khz filters shown in the pictures. I ran out of IC segments so these are soldered in. Selectivity increased dramatically, although not quite as much as it did on the 4155. But it still is hot, no doubt about it.

Looking at the front panel from left to right: 1. power button, 2. eight presets and an "enter" button, 3.the display, 4. AM/FM selector 5. IF wide/narrow 6. Noise reduction and 7.Mono/Stereo. The noise reduction, in my opinion, works very well. Over on the right side is the tuning dial. This is the smoothest, slickest, most enjoyable tuning dial I have ever used. I fell in love with it. Don't tell my wife. The tuning is in 50khz steps. I don't see any way to change that, but that's minor.

This tuner, like the 4155, sounds incredibly good. Whoever designed this tuner for NAD must have done it as a labor of love.

As you can see from the picture above, this tuner is pretty much packed, unlike newer tuners that have almost nothing inside. The bottom cover comes off, so filter changes are easy.

If you ever find one of these, don't pass it by because you'll end up liking it as much as I do. It's a winner and, with proper filters, a great DX machine.

(c)2009 M.Bugaj No reprinting without permission.