I have Sansui TU517. Bought on ebay for about 250? Sent to Stereo Surgeons for new caps, minor repairs like bulbs, feet, cleaning and alignment, total cost $600 and 5 months wait. It was good enough straight from Ebay, just needed cleaning and alignment which could have cost only $150, giving a 400 total. Were I more confident back then I could have done some of it myself except for the alignment. But I love it. It tunes stations 30-40 miles away clear as day, using a ratshack yagi antenna 45 feet up on the roof, bluejeans Belden 1694A with Canare connectors, and grounding block from Altelicon, and FM coax humbuster from Jensen. It sounds as good as my Altmann DAC on good reception nights. If your 717 sounds bad then it either needs work or you're not feeding it well. All ansuis are old enough to need new electrolytics, cleaning and alignment, and the latter 2 should be done every couple years. It is a high end source, so it will show you the weaknesses in the signal. TU-717 is one of the best values in Tuners available. I would recommend Ken at Stereo Surgeons but allow time for the master to do his work, and burn it in, and mail it out.
Alex Lok at theanalogstore.com is also good with tuners, has calibrated alignment tools (he is a friend of mine.)
I'm glad to meet someone who prefers digital radio to analog, there aren't many who do. The objectives of HD do not include better optimum sound quality than analog, but some stations have processors set to default and non audiophile type engineers so maybe your HD streams are mixed a little different. WCPE in Wake Forest built their own analog processor to audiophile standards. On the hour their ID includes a 2 second long tone that is way lower than 50hz! Other than compression, it really does sound as good as a CD. A friend is an engineer with Clearchannel and runs 5 stations, 3 are digital. He doesn't have much good to say about it from technical or sound quality perspective. Of course, with the resolution turned up it could sound pretty good, but I don't know what the max resolution an HD tuner can handle, I wouldn't expect more than 320kbps?
