I know that in the US, the Marantz Cinéma 40 is more expensive than the Denon 4800. But in Switzerland, they cost almost the same and I got a good deal on the Marantz (so it becomes cheaper than the Denon).
Great to see someone else making this very point that I have made several times here, and on ASR. People need to be smarting when doing their search and compare devices on their short list, and not be misled by marketing hypes including the "geo" factors such as price point set based on different level of myth and misconception that could be specific to the locality. In this specific case, US and Canada AV device it appears that more consumers believe the myth that Marantz has a musical/warm sound for a variety reasons, and that justify inflated profit margin/higher list price, versus the smarter (not on everything but on this point only) consumers in other parts of the world.
One example on the opposite end though, Denon only seem to market their lower end integrated amps, and marke their $7,000 (USD equivalent) 50 W per channel plain (no build in dac, or even bass management) stereo amp in the far list only, what does that tell us, that their regular AVphiles are smarter on marketing hypes, but more audiophiles over there are more extreme than North Americans and more incline to buy in to myths related to weight, double down output numbers, gold plating, acoustic feet, toroidal, even oval shape transformer kind of weird stuff? No wonder in manufacturing, most of time it is the marketing/sales executive who call the shots and got the top job, I know, been there many years, engineers have little say, compare to their colleagues in sales.
