What makes the famous Marantz sound character
Reading time: 5 minutes
At Marantz, we believe that music has always played a fundamental role in how humanity perceives reality – we do not merely hear the sounds, we feel them, dream them and even see them. We also believe that true Hi-Fi is about being able to reproduce the magic of a performance. It’s about experiencing music just as the artist intended, as the band was performing. Living up to this premise, all our products are tuned to deliver the famous Marantz sound, with a warm character, a wide and deep soundstage with natural positioning of instruments, and a smooth presentation of the vocals. Giving you hours and hours of listening enjoyment without fatiguing your ears.
A scientific approach?
At first thought, this kind of high quality reproduction requires the best components. But simply using the best components in an audio product will not reproduce the music exactly how the original artists intended. To achieve this, each element within a set must work in harmony with all the rest, they must all be carefully auditioned to ensure they work in complete harmony. After all, we are dealing with music.
So HiFi is not just a scientific approach. You have to think about how you can make a wonderful harmony. It’s the same for a football game. Just look at FC Barcelona. They have the top players in the world, but do they win all the time? No. Harmony or teamwork is essential. That’s what you have to do with HiFi and that’s what we do at Marantz. For our entry-class products and our flagship products alike.
Finding harmony
What we are always trying to do is balancing, from low frequency to high frequency. Trying to keep the same speed for low, mid and high frequencies. Harmony has to be flat. To achieve this, you have to exchange and audit quite a number of components. For example, if you have hard sounding transistors, you may put some warm sounding capacitors. You need a mixture of different characters, like when putting human beings in a team, to get this harmony. That’s what we do with all our products. That’s the uniqueness that make Marantz stand out from others.
Measuring audio quality
Of course we have electronic measuring instruments. But these can only measure instantaneously – it’s like taking still photographs of a dancer: it is accurate but shows nothing of the dancer’s dynamic, speed and rhythm. Music is also dynamic. Its tone, volume, pitch and intensity continuously change. That’s why every time we work on a product we measure its quality by referencing a piece of music that we absolutely know from its original source. Only then we can relate the character of each component as part of a whole. I believe this is the ultimate way to reference audio quality.
What makes a great Hi-Fi set?
One would like to say it is such-and-such a combination, looking into a manual and putting parts together. But essentially, it is all about how the different elements work together – as one holistic system. Why was a certain 60’s Liverpudlian group so special? Was it the song writing partnership? The drummer’s earthiness or the lead guitarist’s? Or was it something else? No, it was all of these characteristics combined – and the fact that they all worked together as one. It is the same with Hi-Fi sets, it is the unique interaction of all the elements. If that interaction is natural and mutually self-supporting, then it is destined to be a great composition.
Our heritage of technical excellence means we can create products with high-precision playback capabilities. But more importantly, it is our love and understanding of music reproduction that gives us the ability to communicate the scale, timbre, pitch, dynamics, and the very essence of a recording. It is this passion that helps ensure that every one of our products unlocks the power, the excitement and the emotion of music. Because Music Matters.
Have you ever wondered, how Marantz sound engineers test and evaluate a new product? Click here to read about best tracks to test stereo imaging.
