Magnum Dynalab FT-11
A tuner that shows up in the back pages of the audio magazines more often as a used listing than as a review subject.
Overview
The paper trail on the Magnum Dynalab FT-11 is thin and strange. The most concrete documentation comes not from a review but from the classified pages of Audio magazine, where the New York dealer Audio Classics regularly listed the FT-11 among its used and demo stock. In the April 1991 issue (p.117), the FT-11 appears at $399, wedged into a long inventory of McIntosh, Krell, and conrad-johnson gear. By June 1990 (p.104) the same dealer had a demo unit at $399, and the following month (p.103) another FT-11 demo at the same figure. A year later, in the September 1991 issue (p.108), the FT-11 is still there at $399. So a Magnum Dynalab tuner held its used value at a fixed number across at least a couple of years of dealer listings.
What the FT-11 actually is has to be inferred carefully. Magnum Dynalab built its name on FM tuners, and the FT-11 sits in that lineage. The brand catalog here lists the MD-108 as a tuner, and the dealer listings place the FT-11 alongside the FT-101 and the FT-205 in the same tuner column. Treat the FT-11 as an FM tuner from Magnum Dynalab, sold new at a price the used market has since settled around $399 for clean dealer stock. Beyond that, the documented record is silent.
The available documentation does not give a production year, a tuning range, a sensitivity figure, a distortion number, or a dimensions-and-weight entry for the FT-11. Anyone who tells you the FT-11 has a specific capture ratio or a specific set of rear-panel outputs is working from memory or from a manual this archive has not yet catalogued. What can be said with confidence is narrower: it was a Magnum Dynalab tuner, a serious high-end dealer listed it as authorized stock, and its resale figure held steady at $399 in the early 1990s.
For a collector, the FT-11's appeal is partly the brand and partly the puzzle. Magnum Dynalab's reputation was built on the tuner as a serious component rather than an afterthought, and the FT-11 turns up in dealer inventories next to far more expensive separates. That suggests it was bought by people assembling real systems, not casual listeners. The $399 used figure, repeated across multiple Audio listings in 1990 and 1991, puts it in the range of a working professional's tuner rather than a budget piece or a flagship.
What owners and buyers should watch for is the usual tuner territory: alignment drift, front-end sensitivity falling off with age, and the condition of any internal battery or memory circuit if one exists. None of that is documented here for the FT-11 specifically, so treat it as a general caution rather than a known failure mode. Buy from a seller who can demonstrate reception across the band, and budget for a proper alignment if the unit has been sitting. A tuner that pulls stations cleanly is worth the $399 the trade was asking. One that drifts is a project.
The FT-11 is not the Magnum Dynalab model that gets written up in the collector literature. It survives mainly in dealer classifieds and in the memories of people who owned one.
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