I took delivery of a
Marantz 7701 pre/pro for our Eagan town home about 10 days ago.
This is a 2.1 system.
Since there is no good 2.1 AV device I had to use a multichannel device.
Set up seamed easy. Audyssey recognized the two speakers and the sub, there are two one in each speaker.
A word about the speakers. The speakers have four compartments. The two bass/mids are in their own sealed compartments have an F3 of 90 Hz with second order acoustic roll off at that point.
There are two 9" morel drivers in the cabinet in isobarik configuration which you can't see. Behind the mid woofers there is a sealed chamber, at the bottom is a vented enclosure. These latter two enclosures form isobarik couple cavity subs, with F3 of 27 Hz on the low end and 90 Hz on the upper end. To get this bandwidth of 1.5 octaves required the sub system to have a Qt of 0.7.
Previously the system was driven from an electronic crossover I designed and built for the purpose. The tweeters are Scanspeak. These speakers were my last location recording monitors, which is why they are on wheels. They are very nice speakers indeed.
So Audyssey surprised me by finding the correct crossover points right away. It crossed the bass/mids at 60 Hz, to keep the second order acoustic roll off for half and octave. It set the sub crossover at 120 Hz, again to keep the second order acoustic roll off at 90 Hz for another half octave.
I really am amazed how Audyssey manages to figure out my speaker systems which are well off the well trodden path.
The sub level was set about 1.5 to 2 db too low, which is a very minor point.
Now the problems began.
The system sounded really bass light and sibilant.
Although there was sound from the subs during set up, it was clear the subs were not working on program, despite have been set to LFE + main.
So I did an manual set up and the subs did not reproduce the test tone.
My first thought was that I was stupid as usual, but after tearing my hair out looking at a 186 page pdf manual a day after my first cataract surgery. I came to the conclusion that this unit did not work right. There is no printed manual. There is a disc with a pdf manual that is identical to the online manual I had previously downloaded.
After a long Internet search I found that this is a known problem with these units in 2.1 mode that Marantz have not publicly acknowledged to the public, dealers or sales staff.
The Internet work around is to tell the unit there is a center speaker when there isn't and then there is sub output. However if you do this all peripheral units must do the mix down to 2.1
I phoned customer support and "dropped the goods" on them. As they could tell I knew my facts there admitted the problem. They could not give me a date for a firmware fix. They said there engineers were working on it, but apparently they are obsessed with trying to make this unit run Pandora, which it apparently does not now. It admits to this problem on their website
My dealer, who gave me a really nice discount, was very upset that they had not been informed, and put me in touch with the senior rep in charge of a huge area of the US. He was also very upset he know nothing of this problem and apologized profusely.
I have given them a month to fix this problem or I will return it.
The fix of tricking the unit by selecting a non existent center did not pan out well.
It was not long before my wife selected a movie on Netfix, that happened to be one that streams in Dolby 5.1. Although the Panasonic BD player was set to do the mix down, I quickly found out it only does this for discs and not streaming! So there was no dialog.
I found out that selecting surrounds instead of the center also activates the sub signal.
This is better as all you miss pretty much is flying bullets from the rear.
However I find this situation totally unsatisfactory.
As far as sound quality, Audyssey is again the issue.
The unit has Audyssey MultEQXT, DSX. The Audyssey Eq was run several times and sounds dreadful. The Audyssey flat setting is even worse. It makes a set of really nice speakers, sound forward, shouty and sibilant. All these are faults I can't abide. If you use Audyssey just use it for crossover, levels and delay. I strongly advise against using it for frequency response correction. I spoke to the owner of the dealership about this. I have known him for years. Is view is that if you want to make good speakers sound awful then use Audyssey. Whether they can improve lousy speakers, I know not, but I highly doubt it. I spoke to Billy Woodman about this when I visited ATC. His view that trying to equalize speakers the way Audyssey and other systems do, is completely flawed and doomed to failure. My experence would confirm that.
Without the Audyssey frequency response correction the unit is sonically excellent and neutral.
The unit runs very cool, much cooler than my AV 8003 which gets slightly warm. This unit produces almost imperceptible heat.
The ergonomics of set up and use are excellent.
The unit does have a phono input and generous HDMI connectivity.
The unit has a Ethernet port, but no Wi-Fi capability. This seems to me a serious error, as it means running a cable across the floor to the router to do firmware upgrades. This unit is not in a location where it is possible to hard wire it. So I can't use streaming or Internet radio, however I have other peripherals that have Wi-Fi and do.
If you are going to use this unit with more than 2 channels, I think you will be pleased with this unit. At this time this unit will not perform correctly in 2.1 format, which I regard as a serious issue. Marantz need to publicly admit and disclose this.
Denon Marantz have been owned by Bain Capital for some time. I'm not sure how well managed they are under Bain. The rep I spoke to let slip to me that the outfit is understaffed to a serious degree, especially in engineering where it really counts. So I suppose its profits, profits and profits, and blinders as to whether what they produce is any good.
They sold off McIntosh to an Italian outfit a few months ago. I suspect Bain may bail out soon, which probably can't come soon enough.
This really is a problem, as I regard Onkyo as a problem child, and now we have Denon and Marantz questionable. That leaves HK, Pioneer and Yamaha plus valiant efforts from EMO. The pickings are getting far too slim.
All this makes me pine for the "Golden Age of British Audio." Those really were the days.
Now however, producing boards for chip sets and some custom chips along the way, to say nothing of the huge expense of writing software, pretty much confines the development of these types of units to those with very deep pockets. I think that is a huge threat to those of us who love good audio and now video.
