Sound quality.

Price, no RDS, lack of features, build quality.

This is a great sounding tuner, and is of course exactly the same as the Alpha 7. When the source is high quality, which is rare, you sometimes have to pinch yourself that you're not listening to CD. The sound is well rounded, smooth, and reasonably detailed.

However I do have a few gripes about the build quality. The plastic front isn't great, and neither is the display.
The remote is also pretty plain. The "previous channel" button on the remote actually takes about 5 seconds to work, and steps forwards 15 times which results in being one station back from where you started from (there are 16 presets). What a joke!

I've also had my tuner in for repair 3 times. The first two times I pointed a "one-for-all" remote control at it, and the display goes blank and that's that. Try it in your favourite HIFI shop (program the "down" button...) Pretty poor, and hardly my fault. My third tuner overheated quite severely, and has now stopped working.

In spite of all of these problems I'm still quite glad I bought it, although now I'd definitely choose an RDS tuner.

sound quality

none

i already had an arcam alpha 10 amp and 7se cd so was slightly biased when it came to choosing a tuner.
sound quality is first class with an outdoor ariel, not so
good with the supplied indoor thingy.
unlike other reviewers i found reliability and build quality to be first class as with all arcam products that i own and would certainly buy the same again.