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Review 1 of 1
Price Paid:
$2500.00
from Hi-Fi Corner (gronin Summary:
Connecting the unit is pretty straightforward, especially when you're used to handling HT equipment.
I have the Mordaunt-Short Declaration 500 THX-Select speaker system and hooked it up. This system has 2 active front towers and allthough they can 'drain' the bass information from the speaker cable, i prefer to feed them bass information through a receivers bass out connection, and setting the crossover correctly for the decvice.
When i first fired up the SR9600 i was heavily dissapointed !! There was close to no bass response !!, I was starting to feel sorry for myself, but realised that this was marantz... so maybe i was doing something wrong, finally i grabbed the manual and found out that de sub-woofer setting was set incorrectly. The receiver disables the sub-woofer if your front-speakers are set to LARGE, so after i set the subwoofer to BOTH ( which now sends bass information to the subwoofer according the selected crossover) i finally was starting to hear improvement.
The system needed a long break in period ( the longest for me up til now) but my patience has luckily been rewarded !!.
the sound in stereo mode with cd's like the new keane-under the iron sea sounds breathtaking !! Never before did i hear this clarity and power !! The former Harman/Kardon avr7000 ( not bad at all!) made the speakers crisp, but could never let them shine the way the SR9600 has. I finally believe that the speakers have reached optimum performance.
On to movies....
This spring i saw V for Vendetta in the cinema. I never had any expectations of the movie, heck i didn't even know what the movie was about untli i saw it ! But what a movie it turned out to be !! i had chills running down my spine and goosebumps all-over after some scene's. A movie that seemed to grasp me like no other has been able to since i was quite a few years younger.
I use the receiver now accompanied by a Hitachi PJ-TX200 in USA PJHD52 and 2 nights ago my best friend and me watched V for Vendetta again, this time at home on my home Cinema. The volume cranked up for this one ;)
The same chills ran down my spine as i felt months ago... the same goosebumps
The marantz SR9600 outperformed even my wildest expectations.... it has allowed me to finally experiance real-cinematic sound levels coupled with the highest quality of sound available on the market.
The video section of the marantz is also very impressive, you get HDMI 1.1 Switching and video-upconversion (alas only on the HDMI inputs up to 1080i)
It can also upconvert composite to s-video to component and s-video to component.
the receiver offers also a source direct mode and a pure direct mode.
I find myself disliking these modes, since the s-direct mode results in weaker bass response for my set-up and the pure direct mode, turns off the subwoofer out ( thus eleminating all of my bass completely and turns off all video circuitry).
I have no doubt that in a conventional system these modes will make the SR9600 sound even better, allthough it already sounds beatifully without them.
I must confess that i havent used the MRAC feature which is a major selling point these days, since i manually fine tuned the receiver and everything sounds great.
I will try it one of these days for the fun of it, see if things can get even better !
The Remote is , i guess state of the art allthough it bugs me to have to scroll through pages to get to 1 setting. when in the past i could find it blindly on every remote.
The receiver has it's DB measurements in 0.5 db steps which is great in theory, but eventhough i find the display of the SR9600 great, it bugs me that the volume isn't displayed LARGELY ENOUGH for me to see what i'm doing ( and there's nothing wrong with my eyes). So each time i set the volume i have to go through the hastle of pushing the status button on the remote to view the volume reading on the remote, and when it's dark i have to also light the remote firstly. I don't know if others find this annoying, maybe not if you set the sound by ear, but i usually get used to levels of sound for every input and just remember those so i can set the device quicker when listening to that specific source.
Since my speakers are THX certified, i have long wanted a THX capalbe receiver and those are usually quite costly...I'd like to note that i got my receiver at a super low price. At the moment they are being sold for € 3500 here in the Netherlands and sometimes you see them for € 3200 or something like that. In my case it was a case of being at the right place at the right time in a super large sale with absolutely crazy price offers. I went to the sale wanting to take a look at a former Top-model THX ultra 2 receiver by Onkyo ( the 989) and came home with a SR 9600 :) As soon as they mentioned the price to me i immediately decided to buy it without even listening to it, relying on the Marantz name and former Marantz products i had owned, including some A/V receivers ( sr 590 , sr 7200)
In my case the value is even higher than for most, but even if you pay € 3500 for the unit it's stil half the price of denon's flagship , which to mee seems loaded with stuff i would not likely use and that unit costs € 6900 here !!. The marantz is half the price but can easily stand it's own.
Strengths:
Design, Stereo sound second to none, surround sound experience, video-up conversion, MRAC ( calibration), Sound of the Tuner very good!, touch-screen remote. Weaknesses:
Speaker Binding posts have a cheap feel over them compared to competition, however the SR9600 is cheaper than most of the competition, but sounds equally wel if not better in most cases) , annoying indication of DB setting on it's display, have to use the remote to see how loud it's playing. Touch screen remote works rather slow, and changing one simple setting takes too much time. Similar Products Used:
Marantz SR590, Marantz SR7200, Harman/Kardon AVR7000
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5 of 5
