Marantz Cinema 70s AVR Review

[Deleted member 48726]

And that’s not even touching on the Video processing side of this device. AVR’s have essentially become Audio Video dedicated computers. Then there’s room correction of some type. HDMI performance, Various Streaming Services performance (max throughput). I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to spend a full week testing out every attribute and functionality and still miss something. The ultimate problem with these devices is they try to do so many different things that they forget to do any of them well. I know Amir is happy to see the ass end of this kit being reboxed and shipped out before we all come up with a list of stuff we want him to test.

That just means we need to hurry up and finish the to-do list for him!

 

[peng]

Pre-pro kind of negates the small form factor unless you are using active speakers.

Yeah, that's too bad. Anyway, apparently Anthem has a slim one coming, and if that one shares the audio signal chain circuitry and parts with the MRX series, it will measured much better than the C70 that is limited by at least the DAC, for near 100 dB SINAD chasers.

 

[peng]

No HDAM.

It does show that good HDAMs are good (AV10).

"Good" for not adding THD+N only, but in terms of the claimed advantages they offer:
Website marketing blurb:

Logically, none of those could be true. For example, how can HDAMs make the receivers perform with almost zero background noise, they have been shown (schematics publicly available), and they even said so, that they are just discrete opamp buffers. Being an extra buffer, the only possible benefit that can be believed based on logic is lower output impedance, that unfortunately Amir never measured on any of the HDAMs equipped AVRs.

Even if we assume it lowers output impedance, that may result in audible difference but the claimed (on other Marantz website marketing blurbs) will not translate into the "warm", "musical" sound that some claimed tubes might offer.

IMO, the absent of HDAMs really might be a good thing of the Cinema 70 and the previous NR series as that would partially explain the lower cost and less heat, without losing "sound quality". Though obviously they didn't do a good job with their power amp section.

Regardless, if they ever drop to $799 (Canadian), like the NR1510, I will buy one for sure and use it as 2.1 preamp because I am impressed enough with 94 dB SINAD at 2 V. That's almost 20 dB better than the AV7705 and as good as the AV8805A

HDAMs help to make Marantz SR-Series and AV Receivers perform with almost zero background noise, they have also drastically improved the speed at which signals coming into the module are translated into amplified sounds going out.



This means that the output of a Marantz amplifier is a far more responsive, and offers a more accurate representation of the input.

As a result the music sounds fresh and alive, more rich and dynamic, and with high frequencies you can trust. It's yet another way that Marantz helps to make your music sound like it should.

 

[trl]

@amirm, I've ordered it from amazon.de (646 EUR with free shipping within EU) 2h ahead of your review being published.

I think I'll keep it due to the rather good pre-amp performance, because I intend to drive my front speakers from my A-S701 via the 70s's pre-amp, so the Front speakers will have a good sound quality in the end, while the surrounds and central will be fed from the 70s. I would say that for movies is decent enough, while for music is a no go in terms of performance or audiophile quality.

L.E.: I purchased it mainly due to space constrains, as I want it placed on top of the Yamaha A-S701.

 

[DonR]

What do you mean? Is there a pre-pro you would recommend for a similar price?

Using it as a prepro without active speakers means you will need to find space for several amplifiers as well. Space saving negated.

 

[DonR]

Yeah, that's too bad. Anyway, apparently Anthem has a slim one coming, and if that one shares the audio signal chain circuitry and parts with the MRX series, it will measured much better than the C70 that is limited by at least the DAC, for near 100 dB SINAD chasers.

Hopefully, it will play nice with 4 ohms.

 

[peng]

Hopefully, it will play nice with 4 ohms.

It definitely will if you keep the volume low enough. Any Marantz AVRs will play nice with most 4 ohm speakers. People who don't know well enough about ee principles might have some misconception about the so called 4 ohm capability and might tend to generalize too much...

 

[TonyJZX]

unfortunately there's not much out there that has the combo of features and size but this unit seems to inherit all the bad stuff from the Marantz NR1600/1700 slimline series...

as for Denon equivalents... I dont think they anything like this

HOWEVER... they have a higher end unit that is... comparable and even comparable in price.... if you pay cash you can get this Denon for close to the price of this Marantz... of which Marantz does not get good discounts

But before you get too excited...

Denon AVR-X3800H Review

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Denon AVR-X3800H 9.4 Home Theater Audio/Video Receiver. It was kindly drop shipped to me by a member and costs US $1,699. Not much to say about the look of the unit as it is pretty much similar/same as last generations. Here is the back panel...

www.audiosciencereview.com

Amir is here like the grim reaper to dash your hopes and dreams.

Truly sad this state of affairs.

 

[pogo]

See post above...

I'm with you on that.
But I would like to see such a test at least on one Denon or Marantz AVR.

 

[Svend P]

I actually own one of these, but the fronts are driven by my integrated. I like it a lot.

Please hand in your ASR "Certified Audiophile" badge and gun to Amir on your way out

 

[jaakkopetteri]

Using it as a prepro without active speakers means you will need to find space for several amplifiers as well. Space saving negated.

If we're strict about it, you could fit six Fosi V3s with generic PSUs in the space savings against a 3800h (if you only consider volume by max dimensions). And to make it more relevant, you could fit almost 15 Fosis and place the PSUs somewhere else like many would.

Now try making the comparison against a pure prepro like the Nubert Nuxinema

 

[rana_kirti]

oh no, im keenly considering cinema 40/50. I'm very worried now. Good sir, when is the reviews expected?

 

[SuicideSquid]

Started out promising, dropped the ball.

Really disappointing - after the previous Marantz review and the first few charts in this one I was hopeful Marantz had sorted out their issues and then it just turned into a colossal mess.

 

[TonyJZX]

i am quite amused that even in this slimline unit Marantz has to throw in features that the opposition has... so even a compact unit has to have it

why does it have phono? am/fm? like who cares?

it has a slew of online features which i assume all work well, like wifi and ethernet... its like running water... it SHOULD just work

however i delved into the manual to find out it only supports very basic 4.2 bluetooth so SBC only

but it does do BT out to headphones (if you care about that shit)

BUT i'd say that if I was to have this unit and pass out everything to a set of cheap V3s and A07 Max units then it would perform well enough???

 

[JDS]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Marantz Cinema 70s home theater Audio/Video Receiver (AVR). It was kindly drop shipped by a member and costs US $1,200.
View attachment 333466
The 70s sports the new industrial design of Marantz AV products which I very much like. It looks even more attractive in this slim package. The display is not very informative but I can see it fitting the style now better than it ever did. Back panel shows a simpler layout which again, I prefer:
View attachment 333467

Many of us want a compact setup to go with our flat panel TVs or alternatively serve as our main music and TV/video sound and this is all we need really.

I updated the 70s to latest firmware which took about 10 minutes but otherwise was effortless.

Marantz Cinema 70s DAC/Pre-out Measurements
As usual we start with pre-out to determine the fidelity of digital to analog conversion. Per testing of prior Denon/Marantz products I set the volume to 82.5 and managed to nicely get the 2 volt output using HDMI as a source: (all testing with the output set to "Pre-out")
View attachment 333468
I was really hoping to see noise+distortion as expressed in SINAD to be north of 100 dB but it was not meant to be. I did try Toslink to see if that is any better:

View attachment 333470
The "grass" in the FFT noise floor improves but SINAD remains the same. Going with what we have, the 70s lands in not so good ranking:
View attachment 333471

Sweeping the input levels shows that optimal performance is at lower voltage although you don't gain much:
View attachment 333472

Multitone is at lower level so benefits from above factor:
View attachment 333473

IMD sweep though shows that more optimizations should have been done in noise and distortion front:
View attachment 333474

For comparisons to measurements elsewhere, here is 50 Hz response:
View attachment 333475

There is no filter selection so I was worried that we would see the very slow one from previous generation Marantz products. Fortunately they have adopted a more proper one:
View attachment 333476
Out of band attenuation is very modest though which will cause pain in the wideband THD+N measurements below. Frequency response shows the appropriateness of the filter in that domain:
View attachment 333477

Here is what I talked about:
View attachment 333478

Analyzing the spectrum of a 1 kHz tone shows that the ultrasonic energy is indeed the problem:
View attachment 333576

The unit is susceptible to audio samples when it comes to jitter:
View attachment 333480

Linearity is not great although better than some other AV products:
View attachment 333481

Not a lot to celebrate here although if you look at the review of Marantz NR1510, you will see that it has much rougher results even though top numbers are close.

Marantz Cinema 70s Amplifier Measurements
When I test an amplifier, I first let it warm up at 5 watts into 2 channels of a 4 ohm load. I show this at the end usually since it usually is not eventful. That was not the case here:
View attachment 333482
I left the amp running for a bit and was very surprised when I looked and saw that jump in distortion around 2 minutes. It also has this odd behavior in that every time you send it audio, distortion is higher and then settles down after about 7 seconds. While the amp was warm I don't expect the amplifier to go into any kind of mode to protect itself with just 10 watts of output. Note that I had ECO mode turned off (double checked). Performance before this effect clicked in was already poor. Giving up another 10 dB is just a sin. Here is the same issue in the dashboard:
View attachment 333489

After a minute or two you get this:
View attachment 333490

As noted, once the AVR goes into this mode, you can't get out of it unless you power cycle the amp. Simply turned down the volume, stopping the source, etc. won't make a difference. I almost stopped here as this is just unacceptable. As a minimum it should be documented. But then I considered that the company doesn't seem to be making claims about 4 ohm ability (lowest power rating is at 6 ohm) so I decided to continue and used the better SINAD value in the rankings:
View attachment 333491

If I use the lower number, it would literally fall of the right side of the chart!

Here is an FFT of before and after warm up:
View attachment 333502

FYI I could not replicate the issue at 1 and 2 watts.

Back to the dashboard, I also tested with analog input:
View attachment 333492

Performance is essentially the same so I continued testing with that as that makes comparison to stand-alone amplifiers easier. But I did confirm that in Pure Direct mode, the input is NOT digitized:

View attachment 333493

I set the crossover to 80 Hz and there, if you don't go to Pure Direct, you not only get that crossover, but output gets limited to which indicates it is going through an ADC. Nice to see even in that condition the bandwidth is large seeing how you have output to almost 48 kHz making me think sampling rate of the ADC is 88/96 kHz.

Noise performance is not great at 5 watts but improves at full power:
View attachment 333494

Note that you lose some of this with EQ so we really need better performance.

Multiutone shows the busy grass indicating a lot of intermodulation distortion:
View attachment 333495

Same with 19+20 kHz tones:

View attachment 333497



Crosstalk could definitely be better:
View attachment 333499

We see the distortion kink in the power measurements:
View attachment 333500

Good headroom though since I am only testing two channels and there is power supply capacity for more:
View attachment 333501

Here is the 8 ohm sweep:
View attachment 333503
We beat the spec by 15%.

Sweeping frequencies doesn't impact the overall response but the "hump" behavior changes:
View attachment 333504
FYI sweeping at higher levels caused the AVR to go into protection and would not recover on its own, requiring power cycle. Gave me a scare thinking it was damaged for good!

Conclusions
On the heels of the Marantz AV10 processor review, I had my hopes high for excellent performance but that was dashed with the Cinema 70s. While there seems to be some improvement compared to prior generation, the overall picture doesn't change. DAC performance is just "OK" and amplifier rather poor. Once price goes north of $1,000 I expect better performance. The good looks are there but sadly, the rest is not.

I can't recommend the Marantz Cinema 70s. Company can and should do better.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

Will the great work Marantz did on the AV10 trickle down to lower-priced products? All we can say based on this disappointment is, "not yet." For now, like the Rolling Stones' anthology, Marantz is sucking in the 70s.

 

[Cyberstasz]

Horrible performance.
I was thinking this unit as a Hdmi Pre amp for my 2.0 amp setup but distorsion and jitter is huge, DAC is ultra low tier. No way!

Exactly what I was hoping for.

 

[jaakkopetteri]

Horrible performance.
I was thinking this unit as a Hdmi Pre amp for my 2.0 amp setup but distorsion and jitter is huge, DAC is ultra low tier. No way!

Where do you see huge distortion and jitter and what would you consider acceptable?

 

[totti1965]

57 dB - thats a lot! For children´s room tape recorder of the 1970s....

 

[AdamG]

Amir is here like the grim reaper to dash your hopes and dreams.

He doesn’t dash our “hopes and dreams”. He saves us from blowing our “cash of streams” on junk disguised as some Reserve Elite AVR. As it turns out it’s lipstick on a Pig. Thank you Santa Amir. I can just blow my money on Coke instead!!! Coke Zero to be specific.

 

[Sal1950]

Much appreciated Amir. As far as compact good looking, 1st tier brand products go, this Marantz should do better.

The ultimate problem with these devices is they try to do so many different things that they forget to do any of them well.

Amen, but lets not be too hard on them guys, it's a very big picture to look at.
We all hoped for more but on the flip side lets look at development time, costs, needed compromises, and all the rest.
Here we have a $1200 retail AVR, selling for $1000 right now at Crutchfield and I didn't search for the BEST price.
To appeal to folks that want a "compact" rig they've shoved 7.2 channels into this very small chassis. They've paid all
the licensing agreements to Dolby, DTS, HDMI, and the rest, etc etc etc.
This is their very bottom of the barrel AVR and in total offers a whole lot of product to the customer looking to spend not much money.
Not too bad at all IMHO.