Harman Kardon Citation 14
A tuner that reads noise instead of signal strength, and the first one to carry Dolby B on board.
Overview
Every FM listener knows the moment. A station that is clean on a good night gets hiss on it, and you twist the dial a hair off center looking for the sweet spot. The Citation 14 was Harman Kardon's argument that your ears had been doing a job the meter should have done all along. It didn't tell you how strong a signal was. It told you how quiet it was.
The headline feature was a quieting meter. Harman Kardon's own advertising billed it as a first, with a patent pending. It reads signal-to-noise ratio rather than raw signal strength, so you tune for the highest number on the meter, even if the center-tuning indicator isn't perfectly centered. The tuning window is a departure from the long sliding scales of the era: a large luminous drum of station frequencies, driven by a smooth knurled flywheel below it, with the quieting meter and a center-channel meter to the left.
The second first is the one that dates the Citation 14 to a specific broadcast moment. A Dolby switch engages the B-type decoder and lights the double-D trademark on the panel. The reviewer who lived with one reported a very audible improvement in signal-to-noise on decoded broadcasts. He also found the undecoded sound a touch bright, and a modest treble roll-off handled it. The same reviewer noted the decoder can't rescue a noisy source. A hissy tape stays a hissy tape.
For off-the-air recording, the Citation 14 pairs the Dolby decoder with a 400 Hz tone oscillator. A level-set switch feeds a sine wave at 50% of full FM modulation into a recorder's inputs, so you can set levels to 0 VU before the music starts. The front panel has function controls (mono, auto, stereo only), a stereo noise filter, sliding gain controls, and mute and power switches. The rear panel adds outputs for a quadraphonic decoder and a scope, plus stereo and mute threshold controls that let you set how weak a stereo signal the tuner will accept.
Harman Kardon's advertising quoted a signal-to-noise ratio of -70 dB. It also claimed the multiplex circuit senses phase error in the pilot signal and readjusts for maximum separation and minimum distortion. The company said this phase-locked-loop circuitry adjusts automatically as you tune.
The Citation 14 listed at $525. The companion Citation 15 had the same phase-locked-loop multiplex, quieting meter and 400 Hz oscillator, but no Dolby circuitry, and listed at $395. Both were announced alongside the Citation amplifier, preamplifier, and speaker line. Harman Kardon's copy positioned the 14 for listeners who can't tolerate the suspicion that there's anything in their music but music.
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