Patrick Turner wrote:

I won't budge from the idea that its possible to digitise the signal
from the antenna and simply apply suitable algorithms, and get
digital decoding, without all the phase shift caused by consecutive
tuned circuits.

And I agree with Patrick. Despite my desire to have a nice, kit-made,
high-performance AM tube tuner, ultimately I think the best radio
tuner for sound quality and overall performance (whether AM, ASM, FM,
digital broadcast, etc.) is the pure digital system as described by
Patrick.

But do the necessary low-level A-D converters already exist? Is anyone
actually building radios on this principle, or are we still a few
years off?

Jon Noring

[p.s., pure Class D digital amps are continuing to improve, with
better switching and so on, so ultimately the only analog streams
we'll be dealing with will be radio signals captured by the antenna
(which will promptly be digitized), and the output to the speakers
from the last-stage PWM of the digital amplifier. Everything inbetween
will totally be digital, using advanced and inexpensive DSP to do
things not possible in the analog processing realm. The only realm
left for the audiophiles to play in will be speakers.)