Marantz Receivers?

[jmorgan127]

I am looking at purchasing a new receiver (say $1K, plus or minus a few hundred, range) and the sales person is pushing Marantz. I will not let the sales person sway my decision, but I did listen to the Marantz and it sounded very good.

Unfortunately when I look for opinions here and elsewhere, I hear almost nothing about the Marantz receivers. Everyone mentions them in the same breath as Denon, Yamaha, NAD, etc. and what few opinions I do see on their music quality are very good. But I just don’t see any real discussions on specifically comparing Marantz to other brands.

So I figured I would ask. “How does Marantz stack up to the competition?” I personally am interesting in a 60/40 music to movie split favoring music quality over movie sound.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Jeff

 

[Yamahaluver]

Marantz has tradationaly made some real quality components and with minilalist no frills approach concentrating more on quality. Their sound character is pretty close to Yamaha. Denon now owns Marantz but dont think they would meddle with the technical aspect, it is a very good buy.

 

[nick_danger]

A friend of mine just upgraded from his Marantz separate receiver/DD decoder to a Yamaha RX-V2400 because his decoder crapped out. I've got a stereo Marantz receiver from 197? that weighs about 900lbs and still works amazingly well... Marantz make great stuff from what I've heard.

Personally, I'm a Yamaha guy now, but I can't say that I would pass up a Marantz for the right price.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I would say that Marantz gets mentioned in the same breath with Yamaha and the like because it is nothing to rave about. It fits in nicely with the mold...

But, I worked with Marantz in 2002 and customer service with them is almost non-existent if you have a problem. I also was putting it in areas where people wanted zone 2 functionality and it performed very poorly for this purpose. The Yamahas of that time did equally bad.

The next year Yamaha performed flawlessly for multiple zones, while Marantz still did not perform well. RS-232 for their product was also very weak, while Yamaha did very well.

Now, this has nothing to do with audio quality or sound, but it does say a lot about the engineers who are designing and working on their product. They may be focussed strictly on sound, but they seem to miss a lot when it comes to other aspects of their product.

I currently work with some other pieces by Marantz, only they are repackaged product from other manufacturers. So, Marantz is happy to take a competitors product, slap their name on the front, and resell it for more... then not really be able to support it. I won't be looking to purchase Marantz for a long time and I have always talked people into Yamaha when they had been thinking about Marantz.

THOUGH: I have not been unimpressed with the actual sound of Marantz receivers, or their performance, when set up in a single zone IR controlled environment.

 

[Unregistered]

Thats funny, I have heard the exact opposite. After reading countless threads, I had thought that the Yamaha receivers are considered bright that match well with laid back speakers. And the Marantz receivers are considered to have a very warm sound to them, and match very well with more bright or forward sounding speakers.

 

[RaT]

Thats funny, I have heard the exact opposite. After reading countless threads, I had thought that the Yamaha receivers are considered bright that match well with laid back speakers. And the Marantz receivers are considered to have a very warm sound to them, and match very well with more bright or forward sounding speakers.

I have found the Marantz ( and Denon) to really be more in line with the type of AVR I would want. I have only been told much the same as you mention about Yamaha being bright. My ears don't discern the difference between any of the AVR's in the same configuration. I like both the Denon and Marantz for the LACK of digital sound configurations they don't have. I find using our Yamaha with it's Tokyo church and Jazzclub digital simulations interesting for a day or two and then I wonder why they are there. If they were not there, would the cost of the AVR go down? Pioneer falls somewhere in between. The Marantz is a solid AVR, I'm not as crazy about it's brushed aluminum face as most of the others, but then, I also like to pretty much hide everything anyway so it really should not matter.