Denon/Marantz - the end is near

[Miker 1102]

If any of y'all are within a five mile radius of me, I'll come collect...
May as well start hoarding AVRs too.

I have already started.

 

[Miker 1102]

PAC is in the same boat, if I'm not mistaken! Didn't they lose the Pioneer Elite and Esoteric license last month?

Yeah the Onlyo business is bleeding money. I doubt it will exist after this year. Not to any fault of thr engineers. They made decent products for the money. Sony ans Yamaha will be whats left. Sony is the avr that gets no love on ASR. They are well made.

 

[Miker 1102]

Masimo's new management will not liquidate Sound United and the associated brands like Bowers & Wilkins, Denon, Marantz, etc. They're just not happy with the financial proposals they've received from potential acquirers. I'd consider Masimo a motivated seller at this juncture as they've made it clear they do not consider Sound United as a strategic business and indicated a desire to sell. This is the dilemma of the motivated seller in general - when people know you don't want something, they will make low ball offers to begin negotiations. Exacerbating this is the fact that the brands, while valuable, become increasingly less valuable to potential buyers as time goes on and the businesses deteriorate. This will get resolved sometime in the near future and Masimo will accept the highest offer they can get.

Exactly. D+M is not going anywhere, but a healthcare electronics firm is not the right owner, as shareholders indicated the day the acquisition was announced. As such, Massimo is a motivated seller. The volume home theater market, which was once occupied by low-end AVRs and HTIB, is being eaten by soundbars, if it isn't gone already. HT manufacturers like D+M need to move upmarket to maintain relevance with the smaller, more well-healed customer base that still wants to invest in a full discrete home theater. Marantz has done a great job of that FWIW, with products like the AV10, Model 10, and Cinema 30. Do they need 1:1 duplication across the board with Denon X3800H/Cinema 50/4800/C40/etc? Not sure, but that will be for the eventual buyer to decide.

They are losing money and this makes then a target for a a leverage form that will rip off thier intellectual property and water down thier products. This doesn't look good. Remember, this company has laready been thru leverages buy outs before. I would be thrilled if they could be picked up by a real business that let them develop more consumer oriented avrs in the direction of wiim. If a 300 dollar product can have peq and room correction we can do better than the early 90s avrs we still have. I am rooting for you Denon.

 

[mhardy6647]

Is there a future for AVRs is a different question but whoever wants to find that out might want to acquire D&M.

oh, is that how business works?

 

[mhardy6647]

Marantz already ventured into speaker space

I apologize, because I do know what you mean... but I was amused by the snippet above.
marantz (albeit the Superscope-era marantz, not the original Saul Marantz-era marantz) ventured into speaker space a long, long time ago.

Loudspeakers: When is Good Enough, Enough? Part 1

Initially, the Audioholics topic that impressed most was their multi-part series on cables . After reading that series just about anyone who…

www.audioholics.com

Ol' Bart Locanthi got around.

Bart Locanthi

I would really like to see a page dedicated to Bart Locanthi on this site. He's been a seminal influence from JBL (acoustic lenses, LE drivers) to HiFi in general (loudspeaker modelling, and improved amplifier output design). Something like the Ed May page would be great, even if it's a little...

www.audioheritage.org

 

[Chrispy]

I apologize, because I do know what you mean... but I was amused by the snippet above.
marantz (albeit the Superscope-era marantz, not the original Saul Marantz-era marantz) ventured into speaker space a long, long time ago.

Loudspeakers: When is Good Enough, Enough? Part 1

Initially, the Audioholics topic that impressed most was their multi-part series on cables . After reading that series just about anyone who…

www.audioholics.com

Ol' Bart Locanthi got around.

Bart Locanthi

I would really like to see a page dedicated to Bart Locanthi on this site. He's been a seminal influence from JBL (acoustic lenses, LE drivers) to HiFi in general (loudspeaker modelling, and improved amplifier output design). Something like the Ed May page would be great, even if it's a little...

www.audioheritage.org

Did they sound "warm", tho?

 

[mhardy6647]

I cannot recall ever hearing a marantz 6 (incredible, right? ) -- but the configuration -- CTS phenolic ring tweeter and also a CTS woofer -- was pretty common on entry level, early 1970s monkey coffins. The ones I have encountered were all pretty listenable.
Yeah... warm-ish. Would that make them tepid?
Maybe McInBose will bring some of them back with four or five digit price tags (in USD, that is)!

EDIT: PS to the best of my recollection, the Imperial 7 was as awful as the Audioholics article says they were.

 

[jayapple]

I have a DENON AVR that I mainly use for watching movies. Of course, it will also be used in game consoles, and one interesting phenomenon is that AVR can transfer pictures to TV without turning on, which is ridiculous.

The Japanese claim that AVR supports HDR, 8K, VVR and other game screen technologies, but they can be used without turning on. I suspect it's a switching circuit, the audio is extracted, and the picture is directly connected to the TV. Because these features require your TV to support, so these next generation picture quality is a wire directly to the TV,AVR is useless...

But they spend a lot of advertising space on supporting UHD, which is nothing short of fraud.

Of course I knew there was a Panasonic chip in there to process the video, but I thought it was bullshit and it didn't work.

 

[Beave]

A little detour to the thread topic, but the writing quality (grammar, punctuation, style) in those two linked articles from channelnews.com.au is embarrassingly bad. What gives?

 

[mhardy6647]

A little detour to the thread topic, but the writing quality (grammar, punctuation, style) in those two linked articles from channelnews.com.au is embarrassingly bad. What gives?

Yeah, I noticed that, too, especially the repetition. "We" had some speculation (on another forum, perhaps) about AI being involved with another recent, rather vague channelnews.au article. Not trying to start rumors, just to spread them.

 

[Beave]

Yeah, I noticed that, too, especially the repetition. "We" had some speculation (on another forum, perhaps) about AI being involved with another recent, rather vague channelnews.au article. Not trying to start rumors, just to spread them.

I wondered that myself.

 

[mhardy6647]

I wondered that myself.

if so, it must be an especially bad AI... umm... thingie that they used.

 

[pablolie]

So B&W is in that same conglomerate, too. Anyone disposing of their 805D please message me before tossing them into the trash.

To me this is no surprise. All these companies have catered to the old-fashioned audio box mentality for the most part. They lack differentiation, mostly doing the same thing while merely competing on brand equity internally.

 

[Beave]

if so, it must be an especially bad AI... umm... thingie that they used.

CrapGPT. The free version.

 

[DMill]

Many of these brands have lost their swagger with younger buyers. They depended on their fan base of middle aged + men to keep upgrading. My 26 year old daughter has no idea what Marantz or Denon stand for as a product. In fact, maybe doesn’t even know the name. But she knows Sonos or Beats. As a whole the high end audio market lacks vision beyond selling gear to old men aging out of considering spending many thousands on a system they wish they had when they were 18. As an ad agency guy for the last 30 years I see way too much specs and stats and not nearly enough emotionally compelling reasons to want to buy a specific brand.

 

[pablolie]

Many of these brands have lost their swagger with younger buyers. They depended on their fan base of middle aged + men to keep upgrading. My 26 year old daughter has no idea what Marantz or Denon stand for as a product. In fact, maybe doesn’t even know the name. But she knows Sonos or Beats. As a whole the high end audio market lacks vision beyond selling gear to old men aging out of considering spending many thousands on a system they wish they had when they were 18. As an ad agency guy for the last 30 years I see way too much specs and stats and not nearly enough emotionally compelling reasons to want to buy a specific brand.

That is harsh yet entirely accurate.

 

[ban25]

There is more to come in the future. Marantz already ventured into speaker space, albeit with huge sticker price and performance to be evaluated.

Speaker packages would be next sensible move to optimise lower end HT packages. People often do all kinds of compromises and then not happy with it. Package it all up, optimise design and there you go. Could come on S, M, and L sizes as well. Many happy customers. Apple did that a while back and never looked back.

If you're talking about HTIB, I think that ship has sailed. More upmarket customers (i.e. literally anyone who wants to choose speakers for themselves) are going to avoid it like the plague and everybody else who doesn't want to run wires and configure a 5.x/7.x system is just going to pick a soundbar or surround "system" (Sony Theater Quad or Sonos Arc+Sub+Era).

 

[ban25]

Many of these brands have lost their swagger with younger buyers. They depended on their fan base of middle aged + men to keep upgrading. My 26 year old daughter has no idea what Marantz or Denon stand for as a product. In fact, maybe doesn’t even know the name. But she knows Sonos or Beats. As a whole the high end audio market lacks vision beyond selling gear to old men aging out of considering spending many thousands on a system they wish they had when they were 18. As an ad agency guy for the last 30 years I see way too much specs and stats and not nearly enough emotionally compelling reasons to want to buy a specific brand.

When I upgraded my speakers, I donated my old R11s to a young guy with an interest in the hobby. He's now running those on a very nice vintage MA6500. A new member inducted into the hifi hobby!

 

[PJ 1]

Many of these brands have lost their swagger with younger buyers. They depended on their fan base of middle aged + men to keep upgrading. My 26 year old daughter has no idea what Marantz or Denon stand for as a product. In fact, maybe doesn’t even know the name. But she knows Sonos or Beats. As a whole the high end audio market lacks vision beyond selling gear to old men aging out of considering spending many thousands on a system they wish they had when they were 18. As an ad agency guy for the last 30 years I see way too much specs and stats and not nearly enough emotionally compelling reasons to want to buy a specific brand.

Let them have their Sonos or Beats, I'll keep my records, CDs, and HiFi gear such as D&M anything over that crap. "Modern" music is all in the same key, MAYBE 3 chords, zero originality yet written by over 10 writers, compressed so bad there is ZERO dynamic range, autotune to fix the vocals, beat detective to quantize the time, each section is cut and pasted in ProTools (verse, chorus repeat) or worse, sampled from a 30 year old hit that Rolling Stones praises as "fresh". Eh, get off my lawn...

 

[Fidji]

One thing is for sure - the guys that sold Sound United to Masimo for 1B made one of the better deals in audio industry history. I am quite familiar with M&A transactions and I was really surprised to see 1B valuation of what is basically low growth/low margin business. Curious to see the PPT that convinced somebody to fork out that money. And it shows big gaps in governance at Masimo, which at the end of the day cost its founder/CEO his job.

BTW I have made a bet on CEO getting ousted and was rewarded with nice 50% return. Bough some Trinnov gear for the money ;-).

I will follow Sound United divestment - it looks like interesting case study. My guess it will be some PE with much better Excel skills than Masimo and paying significantly less. Biggest value are here the trademarks, B&W standing out. In the end - buy, do some cost optimization, and the sell in pieces in 3 years looks like potentially viable strategy.

Premium Electronics is tough market and one that can benefit from consolidation and being part of bigger corporations. See -> Bose & McIntosh, Samsung & HK.

If you are getting constantly sold and acquired - like McIntosh or B&W - it is always a combination of a) not performing and b) having appeal to somebody, that they could do better.