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.