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(More customer reviews)I'm a fan of vintage Marantz stereo equipment, their 60s/70s amps, receivers, and tuners were always well made, elegant, and had a signature warmth sound to them. This was during their Saul Marantz and Superscope days. But in the 80s and 90s they were owned under the Phillips brand, and their gear was never quite the same since; be it quality, tonality, and certainly esthetics.
Now a days the company is under D&M Holdings ("D"enon and "M"arantz), and Marantz is bouncing back to it's former self; there's an emphasis being paid again to style (in this case the classic "porthole" design), simplicity (two-knob unit with a concealed interface, logos of features are on the top of the unit as to keep the front face clean-looking), and construction (the sr7005 packs a lot of sound but can fit just about anywhere).
Above all, my fellow vinyl purist will be happy to hear, the Marantz SR7005 brings back the MM PHONO STAGE with a ground! For a long time this was taken out of their receivers (and not just with the Marantz brand) which was puzzling when the company's logo is: MUSIC MATTERS.
Look, not to get too long winded here, so I'll just say this I'm an avid vintage audiophile, an FLAC and AIFF nut, and a HT semi-guru, and this SR7005 does the trick. No buyer's remorse here! A huge step up from the Sony DA5ES unit I was using for home theater stuff, which was just about the same price in 2002.
I'm running the SR7005 with Aperion Intimus 5B Harmony HD surround speakers, mostly use it for 2 CH music and the thing is incredibly warm and above all tweak-able (direct pure analog mode, 2CH w sub, PLII/DTS Neo:6: Music, Movie, and Game mode, even a mode to compensate for lossy mp3 files which sounds pretty good).
With movies, the Audessy XT set up worked beautifully and accurately. It may not, however, be the latest version from Audessy and "only" a 7.1 receiver, but I can live with that. Blu-ray/DVD movies sound and look amazing.
Another thing to note, this amp, when cranked up has never distorted on me, with any speaker (I also ran it with a pair of vintage Henry Kloss Advent Loudspeakers), which is a testament to the hardware. If your receiver is distorting or overdriving, it's crap.
My few complaints are: no S-Video input which is a let down for things like my N64 and SNES that I may want to pull out one day. And, while it seems all companies are doing it these days, I can't stand the digital volume knob; you'll have to keep spinning and spinning to lower or increase the volume. Granted you can program the volume to start at a certain -db but I'd preferred it to have been analog, with a finite 0 and max volume on the barrel.
Other happy surprises:
you can set the blue ring and "porthole" to "off" if you find it distracting to the eye.
Airplay is rad! Spend the $50 and you can turn on the SR7005 and control it via your iTunes. You can also control the Marantz on your iPhone via their free app.
You can also shut down shown INPUT modes so that when you're toggling through the inputs with the left knob, you don't have to pass by inputs that you aren't in use.
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