All this talk about such a sad day, the R-8B now discontinued. I say: good
riddance!

The death of the R-8B was a slow and painful one. The price crept up to
$1500 and it lagged behind the DSP technology of the last five to ten years.
It's platform was based on the R-8 designed around 1990. It was almost a
joke that such an expensive radio had a cheasey plastic tuning knob with no
"feel" whatsoever.
The radio was built like a Muntz TV set, lacking adequate shielding. It's
RF front-end was overloaded with a mulititude of internal birdies. My R-8B
had a hunk of printed circuit board crudely cut and mounted behind the
display board....a very cheap and ineffective effort at shielding. Drake
service and its service manager Bob Frost were in a total state of denial
when I complained about the internal birdies, some hovering at S-9 in the MW
Band.

I dumped my R-8A and 8B on ebay years ago. I would have loved to keep them,
but they just were not up to the standards of my (keeper) Japanese sets.

I am keeping a Drake R-8 (the original) as the best example of the series:
no birdies, no sync hiss, a real metal knob......