Marantz AV power... with hidden HEOS
You might expect high performance from the top-of-the-line one-box receiver from a company of Marantz’s reputation, but now you get HEOS multiroom too.
Welcome to the Marantz SR7011, the company’s current top-of-the-line integrated AV receiver. Integrated? We don’t see that word used so much in home theatre, but it is analogous to stereo because Marantz also offers separate pre and power home cinema amps.
But it’s also ‘integrated’ now in the sense that it works with multiroom audio, supporting the HEOS platform which began life under the Denon brand, which is sister company to Marantz under D+M Group. HEOS is appearing on extended equipment from both brands, though Marantz wears the logo with more subtlety than Denon’s own gear. It’s a great addition, adding both multiroom and smart streaming, like the smart amplifiers elsewhere in this issue. And happily we had a couple of HEOS speakers to hand, so we could check out how well it works on that front.
Equipment
As Marantz’s premium model, there’s no surprise that this receiver has nine power amplifiers built in, each offering up to 125W of power (into 8 ohms, two channels driven). All nine amplifier channels support lower impedances of six or four ohms via a setting in a system menu. But the receiver as a whole supports up to 11.2 channels, with a full set of 11.2 line-level outputs, so by adding a stereo power amplifier you can have full-bore Dolby Atmos with front, centre, surround, surround back and four ceiling/height/Atmos-enabled speakers. Plus two subwoofers — and this is a legitimate .2 system because separate levels and distances can be set for the two subwoofers (although otherwise the signals are the same).
There are 11 sets of speaker terminals, so if you don’t want to add a separate amplifier you can still have two speaker configurations wired up and
switch between them. As a premium model, it includes component and composite video switching (plus internal conversion to HDMI should you want that). The analogue line-level inputs are supplemented by a phono input for turntable (with grounding point).
There are eight HDMI inputs and two HDMI outputs, and all of them support the HDCP 2.2 copy protection scheme, so they’ll work with Ultra HD Blu-ray. One of them is on the front panel under a solid-feeling metal flap. Also under the panel is a USB input, a good old-fashioned quarter-inch headphone socket, a socket for the calibration microphone and, surprisingly old-school, three RCA sockets for stereo audio and composite video. You can use the USB socket for playing back music — pretty much the same file types and resolution as you can from the network -— from flash memory or USB hard disks. The old broadly implemented ability to play content from an iPod or iPhone via a USB connection is no longer available.
Which makes sense. It’s getting up to three years now since the iPod Classic was discontinued, and that was the only remaining Apple device not to support Bluetooth, which is, of course, built into this receiver, although with only the basic SBC codec for Bluetooth rather than the higher specification aptX or AAC codecs. And there’s dual-band 802.11n compliant Wi-Fi and Ethernet.
In addition to all the latest Dolby and DTS sound processors, and a few of its own, the receiver supports Auro-3D as an online purchase from the company’s European arm; this costs $149 Euro. It uses a different speaker arrangement to Dolby Atmos (see our feature last issue), so to make best use of it you’ll probably have to compromise a little on ideal Atmos speaker placement.
Performance
As Marantz receivers have been wont to do in recent years, the SR7011 runs a very detailed wizard to guide you through set-up. It even instructs you as to wiring the speakers, and waits while you do so (it sensibly switches off the speakers while waiting so that nothing unfortunate can happen). But the stuff that you’ve likely done before you even switched it on the first time can be skipped. Note, though, that it assumes a default speaker arrangement: 7.1.2 (normal. 7.1 plus 2 height channels). If, like me, you have 5.1.4, then you will have to go through the wiring sections for each speaker to make sure you switch the right speakers on and off before the system gets to calibration. Even doing that didn’t take very long.
The calibration was by Audyssey MultEQ XT32. It prefers to measure at eight positions around the prime listening position, but will allow you to proceed
after three: the prime position, one to the left and one to the right. Afterwards it asks if you want Audyssey Dynamic EQ applied, to which I of course said ‘No’, and to which I’d recommend all others also say ‘No’ (it acts as a more advanced version of the old-fashioned Loudness control, and while the concept appears to make sense on the surface, it fails to take account of how our brains process audio at low volumes).
It chugs away for a while, processing the measurements and setting up the normal (not dynamic) EQ for your room and speakers. That done, you get an opportunity to check the results. Lately receivers have tended to consider most or all of my speakers to be ‘Large’, even though ‘Small’, with varying crossovers (higher for the ceiling speakers, lower for the others) would be appropriate. Unusually, this receiver set them all to ‘Small’. The crossovers it chose weren’t bad — quite acceptable in fact, though I did a little tweaking afterwards to get them just so. One of the nice things about Audyssey is that you can change the crossovers and still get the benefit of the EQ after the event.
You can go back into the Audyssey menu later and choose what you want the system EQed to: an Audyssey ‘Reference’ curve (with a slight roll off in high frequencies), a flat response, ‘L/R Bypass’ which makes no adjustment to the front stereo pair and uses ‘Reference’ for the rest, or ‘Off’, which is bypass for all speakers.
One other thing: if you love your music and your front stereo speakers are up to it, you might prefer to use just them when playing stereo (or Pure Direct). In the manual speaker set-up there’s a separate setting only for those modes, where you can choose whether or not you want the subwoofer in use, a separate crossover if you do, and adjustment of the levels and distances of the two speakers. To skip EQ and all other processing, just choose Direct or Pure Direct as the playback mode for your stereo music.
I used this receiver to enjoy several Ultra HD Blu-ray movies and several concerts recorded on Blu-ray, along with high quality stereo music streaming via the network. The sound was beautiful. Full, rich and extremely accurate. There were no practical limits on level. The subwoofer balance and integration into the system was excellent in both stereo and surround modes.
With Dolby Surround processing and my four overhead speakers, I continued to experience the extraordinary amount of additional directional information there is in the soundtracks of movies made long before anyone was planning Atmos.
Just as important in function was the video performance. The receiver has a useful information screen (it would be even more useful if it didn’t take so many keystrokes on the remote to navigate through to it) which shows what audio and video signals are incoming and outgoing. The video revealed that the receiver happily passed through 2160p/24 video from Ultra HD Blu-ray discs in their BT.2020 colour space and with ten bits of resolution. With 2160p/60 it was the same, except that the receiver had blanks for ‘Pixel Depth’ (i.e. bit resolution). That said, the TV reported that it was receiving BT.2020 and HDR, so I guess the ten required bits made it through intact, even with high frame-rate video.
In viewing the picture my eyes certainly seemed to confirm the full and detailed handling of the highest resolution home video signals presently available.
The receiver’s automatic deinterlacing is off by default, as is scaling. But both can be set on, with scaling all the way up to 2160p50/60. The auto deinterlacer did a superb job on both 576i/50 and 1080i/50 material, sailing through all my test clips with just one blip of less than a second with the hardest 1080i/50 test. I’d be tempted to set any players I had capable of delivering source resolution to do just that and let this receiver handle deinterlacing. The Marantz SR7011 is a seriously impressive premium audio-visual receiver that delivers first-class performance, and also great smartness too, with the HEOS platform presenting the possibility of using this receiver as a hub for your whole home, not just your AV system.