Connection and Measurements
This sentence may need to be explained or perhaps clarified;
"As such, I connected up my Marantz TT-15S1 turntable and Oppo BDP-105 Blu-ray player via the balanced analog connections." I'm fairly sure that neither the TT-15S1 nor the PM-11S3 has balanced phono connections.
And this one:
"Oddly, Marantz still uses the old balanced connection scheme that reverses the hot/cold polarity so I simply flipped the configuration in the Oppo OSD setup to accommodate this to avoid a polarity shift."
How was it determined that Marantz uses the older connection scheme? Was absolute polarity through the system tested?
Absolute polarity is a straw man anyway, as there's simply no way to positively prove it exists from recording microphone through reporducing speaker, and some modern recordings don't use even microphones for every instrument. If the unit produces a phase inversion from all inputs to speaker output that would be interesting, but still a moot point since we never have complete assurance of the entire signal chain.
The lack of balanced connections: It should be noted that the entire point of a balanced interconnection is common-mode noise rejection. With short connections between components, there is usually little if any need because there is little if any common-mode noise to reject. If you were connecting between rooms...or buildings...then we may have such a need. Otherwise, balancing output circuits and true-balanced high CMRR input circuits require more than twice the component count to achieve, and are often poorly done. A useful measurement would have been CMRR of a balanced input.
