Marantz, Snell Demo Room at SOTU '08

[admin]

The first demo-room I knew I had to spend serious time enjoying at Audioholics’ State of the Union tradeshow was easily the Marantz/Snell demo-room. These two D&M Holdings companies put together on one of the most memorable demonstration I’ve seen. As someone who literally grew up with Marantz equipment through the decades I was interested to see Marantz name in full comeback mode with an all new line of powerful separates. Put them together with handcrafted speakers by Snell, featuring the critically acclaimed D7 front speakers and you get an Audio afternoon to remember.

Discuss "Marantz, Snell Demo Room at SOTU '08" here. Read the article.

 

[engtaz]

That was a awesome Demo room. Very nice setup.

engtaz

 

[Gimpy Ric]

How many of those 10" subs did they have in the room?

 

[Geno]

What price?

 

[Wayde Robson]

What price?

I didn't want to get into pricing in the post itself but..

each of the separates are MSRPing from Marantz for under $3K. Far cry from Denon's flagship seps for $6-7K apiece.

The Snell D7 is a $2K pr speaker (the rest will fall in line with smaller versions of that price) it's quite reasonable for speakers that are made in the western hemisphere, generally I equate that to quality although it certainly doesn't have to be. I can assure you the Snell D7 and the rest of the surround kit was spectacular and would sound amazing in any normal sized room.

I find it interesting thought that Dr. Dr. D’Appolito was acredited with solving lobing in midrange speakers with the placement of tweeter and midrange in the box itself (I am just paraphrasing my, possibly underinformed, understanding of this effect)..... yet the center LCR7 is an MTM style midrange speaker... which is exactly what (as far as I understand) suffers lobing.

That said, I didn't notice any center channel drop off in soundstage and it was a huge room for the speakers. So perhaps the breakthrough attributed with Dr. D’Appolito is that he solved lobing in the MTM speaker design? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I am pretty sure there were two subs in the room but there could have been more hidden throughout.