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Review 2 of 13
Price Paid:
$25.00
from yard sale Summary:
A great, reliable, well built peice of equipment. Sounds good enough to listen to, I still keep it around for the tuner.
I bought a 2250 at a yard sale when I was 12, it was my first step up form the Fisher Price recod player I had since I was 6. It initialy blew me away played through my dad's old Electro-Voice speakers. Sure it was step up from the Fisher Price unit...
Any way I continued to enjoy this receiver for many years to come, with my Sony cd player, EPI model 70s, then Paradigm Titans and fianly Paradigm Mini-Monitor V1s, at which point I realized my receiver was now the limiting factor, not my speakers. I replaced it with a Jolida 101 integrated tube amp, but the Marantz's awsome analog adjusted PLL tuner continued to provide my AM/FM until the Onkyo TXDS494 rocketed me into the multi-chanel world.
The Marantz is built like a tank in all respects, and has a great look with all the soft blue and creamy-white light comming from the front panel. The amplifyer section may actualy be stronger than the pre-amp section in over all audio quality (running the variable outputs from my Sony CD directly into the processor loop in on the Marantz yeilded cleaner treble and tigher bass) and although it's sound is stellar for solid state equipment of it's vintage it manages to be both a little smeary and a little grainy in the top octives. Bass performance is good, but it doesn't rule with an Iron Fist the way some Sansui and all McIntosh equipment of this vintage does. Then again it was less expensive than either when new. Midrange sound is smooth reasonably dynamic and mostly free of color.
Better built than anthing you can buy today for less than $2000, and still good enough to run a second system without too many apologies. I suspect I'll pass this unit to my children or grand-children (if I ever have any) and someone might still be using and enjoying it 100 years from now. Strengths:
Superb build quality,
Excelent sound for the vintage,
Great tuner out-performs almost anything made today, Plenty of inputs, Pretty to look at Weaknesses:
HF performance not as focused or smooth as quality modern equipment, Tone controls and pre-amp circuit seem to be the weakest link, amplifyer section sounds better on it's own. Similar Products Used:
Sansui G-5700
McIntosh MAC-1900
Sherwood receiver
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4.77 of 5
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