Marantz AV7705 Home Theater Processor Review

[w1000i]

Is there a way to split the input signal ( HDMI, Optical or USB ) to multi dacs better than AVs ?

 

[milosz]

Most of those statements could be applied to every consumer product out there.

Bingo.

 

[Sal1950]

1. Imo it's the other way around if by audiophile you mean 2-channel listeners that buy expensive 2 channel gear. Usually 2 channels guys buy into the snake oil and rarely have any acoustic treatments in their room, never do any measurements and so on. The home theater community is filled with DIY subs, measurements, REW, advanced EQ like MSO, Dirac etc., big into treating the room and so on. In many respects HT guys are ahead of the game here. I know a lot of people with home theaters that have 7.1+ that care mostly about 2-channel but enjoy movies as well or multi channel music.

2. Probably true but there are streaming services which provide higher bitrates. If you buy a movie through Apple TV you can get audio bitrate at around 2Mbit. AppleTV+ has total bitrates around 41Mbit peak. I listen to a lot of music and movies and what I have found is that basically all streams that are not Dolby Digital+ 7.1 or Dolby Atmos has very inferior sound quality. But those movies and shows that are in Atmos are pretty good - not as good as UHD discs but pretty damn good audio.

I run 2 channel through Roon with Tidal and CDs ripped to wav that I run from my NAS. Even though these are very high quality files the issue with 2 channel is that the mastering on 99% of everything is extremely horrible. I mean there is almost no music that is mastered with high dynamic range and pristine quality. This is the issue for me. It doesn't matter how good gear I have the content isn't really there. Movies/series/multi channel music is usually mastered way better and with a high dynamic range system in mind which more than makes up for the lower bit rates.

Unless you only listen to classical music from Telarc, 2L etc. you are out of luck with 2 channel. I typically don't listen to classical that much so there we are.

Good post! While 2 channel folks like @milosz look down their noses at the HT-Multich guys, the 2 channel community is totally dominated by audiophools buying $10k power cords and digital transmission cables, wire lifters, grounding boxes and all the rest of the snake oil crap we witness at the Tampa show this weekend. They wouldn't know what it takes to measure a room, run a good DRC software, and get decent bass response if it bit them in the ass.

 

[Tks]

What an odd design >_>

 

[milosz]

Good post! While 2 channel folks like @milosz look down their noses at the HT-Multich guys, the 2 channel community is totally dominated by audiophools buying $10k power cords and digital transmission cables, wire lifters, grounding boxes and all the rest of the snake oil crap we witness at the Tampa show this weekend. They wouldn't know what it takes to measure a room, run a good DRC software, and get decent bass response if it bit them in the ass.

Really.

FYI I have a multichannel setup. I also have a fine 2 channel setup.

In my experience, MOST (but decidedly not all) people with home theater setups don't know how to use the (mediocre) gear they have. Of the twenty or so people's homes I happened to visit in the last year or two who have home theater gear, all but four of them were using the Dolby Pro Logic setting and listening to 2 channel PCM through their gear from all sources. So, no, I have not been impressed with most of the multichannel setups I've personally seen, nor with their users.

FYI I've been measuring room acoustics and trying to correct frequency response issues using available technology since 1972.... and I've never spent more than $15 on an interconnect, $8 on a power cord, or more than 70¢ a foot for speaker wire. I've been an advocate in various fora for debunking the many ridiculous tweaks via double-blind tests and statistical analysis for over 25 years.

Lately I've become rather interested in attempting to correct time domain problems in bass response, and am using some technology that can correct low frequency group delay (within reason.) Frequency response correction is only a small part of what's needed, and simply adding delays to various channels or to LFE channels is NOT the answer.

But we're getting pretty far afield. My whole point is that to expect this Marantz Pre-Pro or any of the other mid-fi home theater products to live up to SOTA performance measures is kind of foolish. They are not built to provide high performance, they are built to be sold, and they get sold in large numbers to folks for whom they are "good enough." They are better than the "Sony Home Theater" package setup, but only just.

I think that Marantz (Yamaha, Pioneer, etc etc) COULD engineer better products but they have no incentive to as their customers doesn't expect it. We can HOPE that engineers at these mass-market companies will try to go contrary to the bean-counters and build gear with respectable performance, but I don't see any evidence that these hopes will be fulfilled.

I wonder if the "high end" home theater pre-pros like Krell and Levinson offer better measured performance, or if they just offer higher prices.

 

[jhaider]

Not to argue but for clarity sake?
Is this sourced from a specific thread of actual 7705 users? According to Marantz 7705 product page it indicates 7.1.4 Auro 3d capability. I also see nothing regarding limitations with "auro-matic" mixing in the 7705 manual. See: https://www.us.marantz.com/us/Products/Pages/ProductDetails.aspx?CatId=AVSeparates&ProductId=AV7705
Maybe I missed something in the 338 page manual?

This is sourced from using 7703 in a 7.1.4 channel installation. I do not believe the capabilities have improved in newer models.

 

[Gedeon]

Really.

FYI I have a multichannel setup. I also have a fine 2 channel setup.

In my experience, MOST (but decidedly not all) people with home theater setups don't know how to use the (mediocre) gear they have. Of the twenty or so people's homes I happened to visit in the last year or two who have home theater gear, all but four of them were using the Dolby Pro Logic setting and listening to 2 channel PCM through their gear from all sources. So, no, I have not been impressed with most of the multichannel setups I've personally seen, nor with their users.

FYI I've been measuring room acoustics and trying to correct frequency response issues using available technology since 1972.... and I've never spent more than $15 on an interconnect, $8 on a power cord, or more than 70¢ a foot for speaker wire. I've been an advocate in various fora for debunking the many ridiculous tweaks via double-blind tests and statistical analysis for over 25 years.

Lately I've become rather interested in attempting to correct time domain problems in bass response, and am using some technology that can correct low frequency group delay (within reason.) Frequency response correction is only a small part of what's needed, and simply adding delays to various channels or to LFE channels is NOT the answer.

But we're getting pretty far afield. My whole point is that to expect this Marantz Pre-Pro or any of the other mid-fi home theater products to live up to SOTA performance measures is kind of foolish. They are not built to provide high performance, they are built to be sold, and they get sold in large numbers to folks for whom they are "good enough." They are better than the "Sony Home Theater" package setup, but only just.

I think that Marantz (Yamaha, Pioneer, etc etc) COULD engineer better products but they have no incentive to as their customers doesn't expect it. We can HOPE that engineers at these mass-market companies will try to go contrary to the bean-counters and build gear with respectable performance, but I don't see any evidence that these hopes will be fulfilled.

I wonder if the "high end" home theater pre-pros like Krell and Levinson offer better measured performance, or if they just offer higher prices.

Just for curiosity.

Have you try to feed 2 channel setup, with the pre-outs of a better-than-90db-SINAD AVR ? Do you think you could easily discriminate that AVR source from an good cd/DAC at normal listening levels in a DBT ? (obviously same level, direct mode, etc...)

 

[peng]

Of course not. It is the way that slow AKM DAC slow filter works. Here is the spec:

View attachment 49389

As you see, it is supposed to be down 3 dB at 18.2 kHz which is more or less what I showed.

These guys have made a choice to force this slow filter onto their customers. Now, if they were proud of it and documented it as such it would be one thing. But they are not. They just say their engineers in Japan think this sounds better.

Thank you, that explains it. Since Marantz Japan told us they have been using the slow roll off filter for years, I thought I should check an old S&V review as I remember they used to measure FR for both analog and digital occasionally. Luckily they did do that on the not too old AV8802 and indeed the curve look quite similar to yours. The 8802 also use the AK4490, same one used in the 8805. May be that's why it looks similar but not exactly the same, down only 2.11 dB vs 7705's 2.5 dB for the 7705 you measured. The 7705 uses a lower grade AK4458.

So it looks like you might have been the only one (our hero!!) who just discovered why some people claimed that Marantz AVRs/AVPs sound warmer than Yamaha's, or even their twin brothers/sisters Denon AVR equivalents that share the same preamp/amp/adc/dac but not the same dac filter!! Having said that, I still believe a lot, if not most people who claimed they heard or believe the special warmer "Marantz sound" were/are those who were influenced by hearsay and were specially prone to the well known Placebo effect.

Regardless, people older than 35 or younger but without perfect hearing probably won't notice the <1 dB drop at 16K though. Those, if in a blind test would likely say they heard no difference, hence why they are also two camps out there arguing back and forth forever.

Everything below is from S&V's review, for more details, follow the link:

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/marantz-av8802-surround-processor-review-test-bench

The above chart shows the frequency response of the left (aqua), center (green), LFE (purple), and left surround (red) channels at the preamp outputs of the Dolby Digital decoder. The left channel measures –0.04 decibels at 20 hertz and –2.11 dB at 20 kilohertz. The center channel measures –0.04 dB at 20 Hz and –2.12 dB at 20 kHz

 

[Gedeon]

Thank you, that explains it. Since Marantz Japan told us they have been using the slow roll off filter for years, I thought I should check an old S&V review as I remember they used to measure FR for both analog and digital occasionally. Luckily they did do that on the not too old AV8802 and indeed the curve look quite similar to yours. The 8802 also use the AK4490, same one used in the 8805. May be that's why it looks similar but not exactly the same, down only 2.11 dB vs 7705's 2.5 dB for the 7705 you measured. The 7705 uses a lower grade AK4458.

So it looks like you might have been the only one (our hero!!) who just discovered why some people claimed that Marantz AVRs/AVPs sound warmer than Yamaha's, or even their twin brothers/sisters Denon AVR equivalents that share the same preamp/amp/adc/dac but not the same dac filter!! Having said that, I still believe a lot, if not most people who claimed they heard or believe the special warmer "Marantz sound" were/are those who were influenced by hearsay and were specially prone to the well known Placebo effect.

Regardless, people older than 35 or younger but without perfect hearing probably won't notice the <1 dB drop at 16K though. Those, if in a blind test would likely say they heard no difference, hence why they are also two camps out there arguing back and forth forever.

Everything below is from S&V's review, for more details, follow the link:

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/marantz-av8802-surround-processor-review-test-bench

View attachment 49542
The above chart shows the frequency response of the left (aqua), center (green), LFE (purple), and left surround (red) channels at the preamp outputs of the Dolby Digital decoder. The left channel measures –0.04 decibels at 20 hertz and –2.11 dB at 20 kilohertz. The center channel measures –0.04 dB at 20 Hz and –2.12 dB at 20 kHz

I wonder if such decay is "corrected" by Audyssey. It seems that it's, since flat, should be flat ...

 

[StevenEleven]

I think @bigguyca deserves a lot of credit for uncovering the specifics of the slow roll off reconstruction filter issue as well, in addition to explaining that it was a simple choice in software editing to select among available reconstruction filters in the DAC chip. And the synergy of the community as a whole, as run by @amirm , also.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...ter-processor-review.11359/page-3#post-324233

 

[jhaider]

Just for curiosity.

Have you try to feed 2 channel setup, with the pre-outs of a better-than-90db-SINAD AVR ? Do you think you could easily discriminate that AVR source from an good cd/DAC at normal listening levels in a DBT ? (obviously same level, direct mode, etc...)

This should be instant and obvious: unless there are noise/hum issues or the speakers are too inefficient or low impedance for the AVR to drive, the AVR will sound much better. The degree of improvement will scale with more capable speakers, too.

That assumes room correction is active and limited to the transition region and below. "Direct mode" is a sop to people who don't care about bass quality.

 

[peng]

I wonder if such decay is "corrected" by Audyssey. It seems that it's, since flat, should be flat ...

According to the graphs I plotted in the past, I believe it did but for me, not any more. That's I have since limited the correction rang to below 1 KHz. I think many users would set the limit even lower, down to the so called room transition frequency, typically between 200 and 300 Hz mostly influenced by Dr. Toole's research.

 

[audioBliss]

Really.

FYI I have a multichannel setup. I also have a fine 2 channel setup.

In my experience, MOST (but decidedly not all) people with home theater setups don't know how to use the (mediocre) gear they have. Of the twenty or so people's homes I happened to visit in the last year or two who have home theater gear, all but four of them were using the Dolby Pro Logic setting and listening to 2 channel PCM through their gear from all sources. So, no, I have not been impressed with most of the multichannel setups I've personally seen, nor with their users.

...

To be honest I could say this to about 99% of 2 channel setups as well. Untreated rooms with no thought about speaker placement etc. Some sort of rule of thumb is used to place speakers and listening position. Rules of thumb no-nonsense approach is usually applied with the results being a smeared wall of sound. Also there are MANY pitfalls with streaming music which most people do now a days, not realising that dynamic compression is on by default in all their streaming clients etc. on top of all the compression applied by the studios. Almost all streamed music is also bitrate compressed - same as with movies but the two channel stuff is also dynamically compressed.

If they have a sub it's almost always some tiny brand name sub and it's only one sub. "It sounds boomy with my big subs for music so I only run them for movies" is common or they have subs that have less capacity then their main speakers. Another common theme is that instead of doing a proper crossover a "fill in the bottom octaves" approach is taken with terrible results. Like what? Both music and movies are sound, sound that needs to be reproduced correctly. The subs sounds boomy cause the room sucks, crossover method is incorrect, or amount of subs does not allow for smooth response, or the speakers/subs are not good enough. Also instead of fixing issues with placement, room acoustics or other fundamental factors easy shortcuts are instead taken by trying to buy them selves out of the issues with even more expensive gear or snake oil products. I see these types of problem all the time.

No offence intended to any 2 channel guys out there but I just wanted to illustrate that it is not black and white. Just because you run an AVR does not mean you don't care about two channel quality. And just because you are a dedicated 2 channel person does not mean you know what you are doing. There is plenty of 2 channel gear out there that is really bad as well or extremely over priced - money that can be spent on the room or other time consuming projects that no one wants to deal with but is what actually makes a difference.

Edit:

I wonder if the "high end" home theater pre-pros like Krell and Levinson offer better measured performance, or if they just offer higher prices.

As far as I know Krell and Levinson don't make any type of serious product for home theater - they can't even decode modern formats from what I can see on their websites. McIntosh would more fall into that category but they are quite over priced and not a big player in the space. In this day and age you basically need to be a professional software company to get everything correct and a lot of these old school "hi-end" manufacturers have not been able to adjust.

What would be interesting to see is if products like Datasat RS20i or Trinnov Altitude 16 have better measured performance and I'm pretty sure they would have.

 

[Lotus97]

What an odd design >_>

View attachment 49538

I cringed when I saw that, looks like something someone would put together in the basement from spare parts.

 

[Gedeon]

This should be instant and obvious: unless there are noise/hum issues or the speakers are too inefficient or low impedance for the AVR to drive, the AVR will sound much better. The degree of improvement will scale with more capable speakers, too.

That assumes room correction is active and limited to the transition region and below. "Direct mode" is a sop to people who don't care about bass quality.

I totally agree with you. Bass management is key for lot of setups, stereo setups included. But amirm objective numbers are focused in "pure dac" performance.

So my point is about milosz specific setup since he has two setups: The "multichannel setup" and the "fine 2 channel setup". He seems very experienced and he knows a lot about sneak oil sellers. And I'd just kindly ask him to double blind test his stereo setup using (I guess) a really good dac/source (let's say above 100dbs sinad) against an average-to-good (above 90-95dbs SINAD) AVR in his own room, without the added AVR processing options just to test DACs, listening both at the same, but reasonable, listening levels.

I know about AVR owners who finally sold their stereo because, once you reach certain level and have a good calibrated setup, the AVR, usually wins. The main issue with "average" AVRs usually comes from less-than-required/bad-quality power amp sections.

 

[Nathan Raymond]

Marantz have vanished into Sound United, and their products are now essentially identical to Denon. Luckily Sound United ended plans to add Pioneer and Onkyo to the stable. Otherwise the market would have started to look very skewed.

Like most of the purveyors of domestic AV gear, Sound United have decided that there is a market for specialised pre-pro devices. But rather than actually design a proper product, they all simply strip the power amps and power supply out of the unified AV receiver, and add a tiny output board that provides balanced outputs, replacing the speaker terminals with XLRs. No surprise the specs are just as woeful, or that the box is remarkably light. Rather than redesign the DAC stage to provide standard levels (which they could), they just feed a balanced line driver from the unbalanced source they already had intended to drive the internal amplifiers. There is exactly no performance gain with the balanced output, indeed it is likely just a bit worse.

Just to add insult, they will often sell you a dedicated power amp, which is just the same AV receiver, but this time without the signal processing bits, and leaving the power amp in place. Just adding cruddy balanced line receivers to feed the same amplifiers you would have got had you just bought the AV receiver in one box. You have the privilege of paying twice for the same device, and get an arguably poorer result.

The market power weilded by Sound United and the other big AV amp makers is worrying. It is very hard of smaller players to get in, and this seems to be a result of difficulties in licensing DTS and Dolby IP. I supect there is a lot of pressure applied making it hard for a quality product to be marketed. The step up to real pre-pro devices is unreasonably huge.

That's a very concise summary of the situation. Here's a recap of what happened to Marantz for those who are interested:

1948 - Saul Marantz founds Marantz in New York

1964 - Superscope Inc. acquires Marantz

1975 - Standard Radio Corp. changes its name to Marantz Japan Inc. (manufacturing of Marantz products had been moved to them through a partnership with Superscope since 1966)

1980 - Philips Electronics acquires the Marantz brand, dealer network, and all overseas assets (except US and Canada) from Superscope Inc.

1992 - Philips acquires the Marantz US and Canada trademarks and dealer networks

2001 - Marantz Japan Inc. acquires the brand and all overseas sales subsidiaries

2002 - Marantz Japan and Denon merge to form D&M Holdings, to later be joined by other brands such as HEOS by Denon, and Boston Acoustics.

2011 - New York City and Boston-based private equity firm Charlesbank Capital Partners acquires DEI Holdings, a Vista, California-based parent company of several brands of consumer audio electronics such as Definitive Technology and Polk Audio.

2017 - Sound United LLC division of DEI Holdings purchases the D+M Group, putting Marantz, Denon, Boston Acoustics, Classe, HEOS, Polk Audio, and Definitive Technology under the same ownership.

Regarding licensing, I figured it must be a big sticking point since Harman Kardon (now owned by Samsung, along with a bunch of other audio companies) has stopped short of adding Atmos, DTS:X or any object-based surround sound formats to their AVRs. This surprised me, since I've been pretty happy with my 7 year old Harman Kardon AVR which at the time was on-par tech wise with the marketplace, and when I went looking to see what their current lineup was like, I was surprised to see them basically give up on even trying to compete in the high end.

As far as affordable mainstream brand AVRs, not owned by some umbrella holding company, what does that leave us with, Yamaha? They have the Aventage CX-A5200 pre/pro and MX-A5200 amp that look good on paper.

 

[Sal1950]

Really.

Yes, really.
Your knowledge and talent comprise a tiny exception to the rule.

 

[laurelkurt]

Wow. I'd been eyeing these Marantzes for their allegedly improved/adjustable Audyssey & advanced bass management capabilities. That's what I'd like to see tested and compared. I don't really care about the surround processing much. Now I wonder how bad my Integra DHC-80.3 processor would measure...Good thing I only paid $534 for it refurbished with 2 year warranty.

 

[MZKM]

Wow. I'd been eyeing these Marantzes for their allegedly improved/adjustable Audyssey & advanced bass management capabilities. That's what I'd like to see tested and compared. I don't really care about the surround processing much. Now I wonder how bad my Integra DHC-80.3 processor would measure...Good thing I only paid $534 for it refurbished with 2 year warranty.

Audyssey XT32 (with the $20 app to correct for the poor native target curves), especially with Dynamic EQ, is more than enough to sway me from any other brand, even if it had Dirac or similar. The other room corrections need to implement a a similar feature for me to even consider them.

 

[jaykay77]

Someone should rebuild one of these with all A+ components