I bought a Marantz AV 30 for my wife's system in our great room. Yes, my wife always calls it her system. She is recovering from a total knee replacement and doing well. Her system had developed a few gremlins in the last couple of weeks. Specifically a hum for a few minutes after switch on and then a pretty big thump at switch off. The Marantz AV 7701 is now nearly 15 years old and has had untold hours of use. I suspect the issue is a power supply smoothing cap fault, these units are known for this. If this turns out to be the case I can probably repair it.
Since I have been so impressed with the Marantz AV 10, I thought i should replace it with the AV30. Scott at Hi-Fi Sound, gave me an $800 discount on the AV30. There are very limited choices in the AVP range now. And the three Marantz units are probably the best available. Other options are Anthem or Steinway. The latter a ridiculous price. I think the Marantz units made in Shirakawa are the best choice. I have been really impressed with my AV 10. The AV 7706 is now discontinued. I have one in 2.2 service in the family room. The SNR is really not good enough. However, I mainly use that unit for watching the news and in the winter for fireside listening. It is fine for that, as long as it stays functional and I am not over optimistic about that.
Anyhow, I copied the settings of the 7701 and set the AV 30 up identically. I have not done any measurements yet. My wife is happy. One thing is obvious immediately, that the picture on the Panny plasma is markedly improved. My wife commented on that immediately.
I have not had a chance to thoroughly evaluated the sound. Despite copying the speaker settings the bass seems a bit louder. My wife again noted that without prompting. I will investigate this further tomorrow. I will use Omni mic and see what the situation is.
The whole point of this is to review the sorry state of affairs in AV.
The market is littered with AVRs with more channels than most can use. AVPS are all multichannel.
Lots of rooms are completely unsuitable for more than 3.1. There is no way you could put more then a 3.1 system in our great room. It is a huge space, with bass leakage going up the staircase. It takes serious power to fill the space.
However, that 3.1 in wall system sounds incredibly good and really fills the space with dynamic sound. That TL sub produces more than bass.
My point is that the industry is not providing what a lot of people would like, and there only option is often some type of sound bar.
Marantz have a two channel AVR with two sub outputs and 75 watts to each 2 channels, but that is a pretty meagre offering.
Denon offer a 2 channel AVR, 100 watts per channel, but no sub connection.
I feel sure those damn marketing clowns are at the bottom of this. Got to have lots of channels, so we can sell more speakers. Wrong! You are just steering potential customers to purchase a sound bar.
I am laboring this point, as the system that creates most interest and enquires to replicate is the in wall system. First it is not just good for an in wall system. It fills that whole space easily with very high quality audio. It takes no floor space and creates zero clutter in our main living space.
That system gets more use than any other here by a substantial margin. When it started giving trouble my wife was very afraid she would be without it. During her recovery from her knee replacement she was pretty much 'glued' to it for the first 2 to 3 weeks. She is making rapid progress now and started driving again five days ago.
I personally never intended to have any system in that space. I thought he AV room and the family room system would be sufficient. How wrong I was. I had to design it at break neck speed, as I was busy with the construction of the house. So I had to furiously "burn the midnight oil" to meet construction deadlines. I was seriously worried whether it would be any good. It turned out to be a really good system which we both enjoy. I think there are wider lessons to be learned about high quality AV in the home from this design. Currently the industry is on the wrong foot, as far as I'm concerned.
