On Wed, 6 Jan 2016, gareth wrote:

What was the best performer (in whatever terms youchoose) of the old
analogue
receivers, and receivers in rigs?

My money is on the Eddystone EA12 for optimum haptic interface, and narrow
on the nose CW filter with its single Xtal, followed in short order by
the receiver in the Trio 830S

(pace that the EA12 preceded WARC 83 by nearly 20 years and lacks the new
bands)

I think you have to clarify. "Receivers that we wished for" and
"receivers that we could actually afford".

I knew someone who had both a R388 and Hammarlund SP-600 in 1972 (and a
KWM-2 complete with the 6 and 2 metre transverter). You kind of needed
both of those receivers since since the R388 tuned in 500KHz (or was it
1MHz) bands, so get to the top of one and you'd have to get down to the
bottom of the next band, while the SP-600 could get across the band with a
few spins of the knob, it had a great flywheel. The R388 was the better
receiver of the two, which I guess is why I had the use of that SP-600 for
a decade.

You look at people now, and those receivers, and the R390, are still
considered pretty high up on, solid state receivers are a whole lot
lighter and have more features and are easier to tune, but most never
reached the level of those top end tube receivers. But people are willing
to spend a lot to get those top end receivers now, which leaves me
wondering how someone I knew could afford both the R388 and the SP600
in the late sixties.

Michael