Company Address: 737 West Artesia Blvd.. Compton. Cal. 90220, USA.
Proton bills its Model 300 as "The Radio ... unlike any other radio in history." Actually, it's a good bit like the old KLH and Advent radios in concept: A good tuner, amplifier and speaker system in one convenient, table-top package.
A closer look shows that the pack age actually has two parts: A biamplified, self-powered speaker system and a tuner/control module. The amp/speaker module includes a 20-watt bass and a 5-watt treble amplifier (at 0.03% THD), driving a 4 1/2-inch woofer and a 1 3/4-inch tweeter, respectively, It has rear-panel controls for tweeter level and input level. For stereo, you add a second powered-speaker module (also sold for component TV use).
On the front of the tuner panel are an AM/FM/tape selector, a power switch, a large tuning knob, and smaller knobs for volume, treble and bass. On the rear are the AM rod antenna, switches for stereo/mono and muting on/off plus jacks for tape input and output, preamp output and a separate jack for the second speaker. AM and FM antenna terminals are underneath the module.
The Proton's human engineering struck me as only fair. The flywheel tuning could have used a bit of extra damping: as it is, it has a slight tendency to store up just enough kinetic energy to nudge itself over a bit when you release the knob. Without the digital dial, you might never know this, as the difference is usually too small to be seen on an analog dial or heard. A more serious problem is that the volume knob (coded red, to distinguish it from the same-sized bass and treble} is a bit close to the tuning knob for comfort. I also would have welcomed having a balance control and having the stereo/mono switch up front.
Hooking the system up for stereo is easy. Just run a cable from the tuner's second-speaker outlet to the input on the second amp/speaker module, and set the tuner's rear switch to stereo.
The Radio tries to bridge the gap between table radios and components, and does a pretty good job of it. You can use it with a tape deck, as the foundation of a modest second system. You can't monitor off the tape but the tape deck in such a system would probably be a two-head unit in any case, so that's no problem. The AM rod antenna can be swiveled around more freely than those on most component tuners, which definitely helped. Arrow LEDs pointed the way to correct tuning: an LED line told when it was correct.
However, some of its component aspects are those I don't like in components. Its AM performance seemed only a bit better than that of most component tuners' AM sections-that is to say, more prone to pick up interference than good portable AM radios.
Again like a component tuner, it apparently has no built-in FM antenna to speak of. With a pair of rabbit ears, it worked fine-but I would have preferred the option of a true radio's plug in-and-play convenience. With rabbit ears-or even a two-bit wire dipole--it easily handled the horrific multipath in my home. That's no surprise, as the tuner incorporates a version of the Schotz variable-bandwidth detector.
Its specs include 1-uV sensitivity (for 3% THD + noise, at 75 ohms, in mono, which the spec sheet doesn't mention), a 1.5-dB capture ratio, 77 dB S/N in stereo, and greater than 60 dB of selectivity.
The sound had plenty of power, plenty of bass, excellent clarity and a tone. I found I rarely used the tone controls and had no need to reset the tweeter levels from their factory positions. Since each speaker system has its own amplifiers, one can add several pairs of additional speakers for use in other rooms, without straining the system; that would work better, though, if the speakers had front-panel volume controls.
Quality, alas, does not come cheap. The Proton 300 is $280, and the Model 301 amp/speaker unit costs $150.
-Ivan Berger
(Adapted from: Audio magazine, Dec. 1984)
Also see:
Proton 440 Tuner (Equip. Profile, July 1985)
Proton AT-670 Tuner (Mar. 1992)
Proton D540 High Current Amplifier (July 1985)
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