Fisher FM-40
Ninety-nine fifty for a Fisher tuner - and the spec sheet that made the competition nervous.
Overview
Fisher's own advertising for the FM-40 leaned hard on the price. "Rarely has that objective been more spectacularly attained," the copy read, calling the tuner one of the company's greatest values "in almost two decades." The FM-40 was an FM-only tuner, self-powered, selling for $99.50 without a cabinet. A mahogany or blonde cabinet added $14.95. Under a hundred dollars for a Fisher-badged tuner was the whole pitch, and the spec sheet backed it up.
The sensitivity figure is the one to look at: 3 microvolts for 20 dB of quieting. The front end used a cascode RF stage feeding three IF stages, and Fisher claimed uniform response of ± db from 20 to 20,000 cycles. It has eight tubes, is self-powered, and has two outputs - one at the detector/multiplex point and one cathode-follower output that would drive leads up to 200 feet. That second output tells you who designed it. The cathode follower meant the FM-40 could sit in one room and feed an amplifier in another without turning the cable run into an antenna.
Fisher's literature describes the tuning meter as a "micro-accurate, center-of-channel" indicator. The control set was kept simple: stable circuitry, few knobs, easy to use. Antenna inputs covered both 72 and 300 ohms, so the FM-40 would take a folded dipole or a proper outdoor array without an outboard balun. It was a compact piece: 12¼ inches wide, 8¾ inches deep, 13 pounds, with a brown and brushed-brass panel.
Fisher's own MPX-100 owner's instructions list the FM-40 among the tuners that connect to the adaptor with both MAIN and REC outputs feeding the unit. The procedure is the same as for the FM-50, FM-90(X), 90-R, FM-100, FM-200, 202-R, and 100-R. That puts the FM-40 in Fisher's first wave of tuners built to accept outboard stereo decoding, and owners who added an MPX-100 could pull multiplex stereo out of it. The tuner itself is monophonic and predates built-in stereo decoding, but the multiplex output was there from the start.
The period press treated it as a genuine budget entry into high-quality FM, as reflected in High-Fidelity (May 1957, p.25).
Owners put them to work.
Collectors should know what the FM-40 is and isn't. It is a mono FM tuner with a multiplex output, not a stereo tuner, and anyone expecting to pull stereo off the air without an outboard adaptor will be disappointed. The tube count is eight, it's self-powered, and the cathode-follower output makes it flexible for multi-room or long-cable installations. The cabinet was optional at $14.95, so plenty of FM-40s were sold without one. Bare-chassis examples are common, and a factory cabinet is a separate find. The panel is brown and brushed brass, and the compact 12¼-inch width lets it stack easily with other Fisher separates of the era. Prices for the FM-40 have never been stratospheric. The 3-microvolt sensitivity and three-IF-stage front end are the reasons to bother.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.