Dear Stephan,

You are correct in your assessment of the Sony ICF-SW7600GR's speaker
audio, at least in regards to music reproduction:

... speaker audio ranges between thin and honky (7600GR) ...

but I should like to comment that, with regard to voice, the '7600GR's
audio is quite clear and easy to understand. Especially when trying to
identify a station, I have found its audio to be fine. (Of course
others may disagree with me.) In any case, I think the fact that the
radio has a true line output jack (in addition to an earphone output
jack) is a major "plus" not offered on most other portable radios.
This line output jack allows easy and direct connection to amplified
speakers or to the auxiliary input on your audio system. When playing
the radio through your audio system (via a cord easily obtainable at
Radio Shack, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., for about $10.00), the
sound quality is limited only by the quality of your system.

Best,

Joe

Joe Analssandrini schrieb:

Dear Stephan,

You are correct in your assessment of the Sony ICF-SW7600GR's speaker
audio, at least in regards to music reproduction:

... speaker audio ranges between thin and honky (7600GR) ...

but I should like to comment that, with regard to voice, the '7600GR's
audio is quite clear and easy to understand. Especially when trying to
identify a station, I have found its audio to be fine.

But it's really no more than communications quality. I've seen
measurements of the frequency response, and that drops like a rock below
about 800 Hz, which is very high for something with a 3" speaker - even
a telephone channel nominally goes down to 300 Hz. (And given that the
IF filter in the set is fairly tight and some audio lowpass filtering is
present, a remaining bandwidth of 800 Hz to maybe 2 or 2.5 kHz is hardly
something to get excited about.) I've been inside my SW7600G, and
there's pretty much no space to work with behind the speaker driver,
meaning the available speaker volume is fairly close to zero. Yet the
older SW7600 sounds better in spite of being very similar mechanically,
and the old ICF-7600A beats them all (here you can actually see the
speaker driver from the back). The 7600G sounds too bass-light to me
even over headphones, but that probably is related to some undersized
coupling capacitors that were "forgotten" in the signal path. (Those
thankfully were eliminated in the 7600GR.) What can be done with only a
slightly larger (4") speaker in a larger cabinet (plus some bass boost,
I guess) was demonstrated by a recently obtained Panasonic RF-3700 here
- it's no DXer at all, but in terms of speaker sound approaches the
Redsun with its 5" driver. I'll try experimenting with some damping on
this set.

In any case, the SW7600GR is one set where the line-out can be quite
useful indeed.

Stephan
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