Marantz – the matter of music
It began 65 years ago in a New York basement and continues today with world-class audio for an appreciative international audience.
Marantz has been making audio equipment continuously since 1952, when the first Marantz product, the Consolette pre-amplifier (above), went on sale at Harvey Radios on 6th Avenue in Manhattan. Needless to say, this makes the Marantz brand one of the longest-enduring in the hi-fi industry. And it is one of the few brands that has achieved ‘cult’ status amongst audiophiles and engineers while at the same time being a mass-market multinational manufacturer.
Yet Saul B. Marantz started the company almost by accident. He just wanted to play his records at a higher quality than the playback equipment of the time allowed, hampered especially by the large number of different equalization characteristics being used by record companies at the time. So he spent four years designing, constructing (and then reconstructing) his own pre-amplifier, equipping it with every equalizer curve for records he could find. He did this primarily for himself, working in the basement of his house on 81st & Austin in Kew Gardens, New York. But the pre-amp (the prototype Consolette) made such an impression on those who heard it that many others wanted one too. So in 1952 he decided to make 100 sets... and less than 12 months later he had produced more than 400. The ‘commercial’ Consolette was named the Model 1, and with this first preamp to include the new RIAA standard equalization curve in addition to older curves, the Marantz company was born.
Saul Marantz was a handy electronics designer, but his outstanding skills were in copywriting, graphic design, industrial design and photography; he was also a competent classical guitarist. His insistence was that good industrial design was as important as superior performance was crucial in bringing electronics out of the garages and into the living rooms of music lovers everywhere.
So much of the heavy lifting on the electronics inside Marantz’s early designs was the work of famous electronics designer Sidney Smith. Smith became famous in the 1940s for designing an amplifier for RadioCraftsman that was the first low-cost Williamson-style low-distortion amplifier, but he was so impressed by the design of the Consolette Model 1 that he asked Saul if he could come and work for him at Marantz. After demonstrating his ability by modifying the Consolette’s circuitry to solve some noise problems in early units, he stayed to become chief engineer.
Stereo, and the Model 7
With the arrival of stereo LPs, Marantz and Smith delivered the Model 6 stereo adaptor designed to unite two Model 1s for stereo use, then soon afterwards the Marantz Model 7 stereo preamplifier, the Model 8 B stereo
amplifier in 1959 and the Model 9 monobloc in 1960. The combination of a Model 7 and two Model 9s is one of the classics in the history of high fidelity, and it was a Model 7C (‘C’ meant simply that it came in a cabinet) that alerted a distant Ken Ishiwata’s ears to the quality of the brand.
“I’d already built several amplifiers for myself,” he told Audio Esoterica magazine in 2016, “but nothing had prepared me for the Marantz Model 7C: I could hardly believe my ears. The Marantz got right through to the emotion in the music. It was then I realised that this emotional response was what hi-fi was all about.”
Another famous name in Marantz’s early history is that of Richard Sequerra, who joined Marantz in 1961 to design an FM tuner. After more than three years of research and development, plus input from several consulting engineers, including Mitchell Cotter, Sequerra delivered what is probably the most famous FM tuner in history, the Marantz Model 10, which had an oscilloscope on its front panel instead of the usual signal strength and centre-channel meters. Although Sequerra is credited with the Model 10’s design, Sidney Smith also worked on it, and Saul Marantz is reported as once having said: “Richard may have designed it, but it was Sid who made it work.”
In terms of Marantz’s high-end credentials, we have it on record that no less a designer than Mark Levinson, founder of Mark Levinson, MLAS, Cello, Red Rose Music and Daniel Hertz, is a huge fan of Marantz designs — so much so that he once asked Saul Marantz to evaluate one of his own early Levinson components.
“What impressed me about Marantz design was its elegant simplicity, its economy and symmetry,” he said. “In a sense, Marantz was building classics equipment so thoroughly engineered that, once a product was finished, few changes were ever necessary.”
Japan and Europe
The Marantz name has been valued so highly over the years that the company has been ‘head-hunted’ several times in its history, first by giant US conglomerate SuperScope in 1964. Superscope began exploring manufacturing possibilities with several Japanese manufacturers with a view to producing lower-cost Marantz products, along with a move into Marantz-branded loudspeakers, while high-end separates continued to be manufactured in California, including the ‘A’ line. The ‘2200’ receivers became highly successful, ranging from 10 watts per channel to over 70, introducing the Marantz mystique to tens of thousands of consumers. Meanwhile the 1970s saw the Californiabased team delivering more of its sequential ‘Model’s up to the Model 32 amplifier, then jumping to the 1973 Model 500 (250W per channel) and the subsequent 510. In 1976,
Ed May joined Marantz from JBL to develop the ‘HD’ speaker line to complement the company’s other high-end offerings.
Then in 1980 came another change of control, with Superscope selling the rights to the Marantz name in Asia and Europe (including Australia) to the European giant Philips Electronics, while retaining the name for the North American market hence the next decade has two potentially confusing concurrent histories, depending on your location, until the later US owners also signed to Philips a decade later.
Philips brought its own expertise in CD and digital electronics, raising Marantz above its own brand as the marque which focused on audio quality above all. So Philips released its first CD player, the CD-63, under the Marantz banner, racing Sony’s CDP-101 to market, and offering 4 × oversampling, something unknown on Japanese players. Marantz soon garnered a reputation as a CD specialist.
LaserDisc followed in 1985, along with the revolutionary RV-55 ‘Sound Field Controller’ bringing the wonders of Dolby Pro-Logic to homes, and CD-R (but not yet consumer CD-R) in 1991, along with the AX1000 ‘Audio Computer’, far ahead of its time in being an all-digital signal processor capable of room calibration and surround effects, effectively the precursor to MRAC (Marantz Room Acoustic Calibration) in later AV receivers.
HDAM, an important amplifier technology for Marantz, first appeared in 1992 in the PM-99SE Special Edition. And those nowfamous ‘Special Editions’ were proving great successes for Marantz, ever since 1986 when the CD-45 Limited Edition was released at the instigation of Ken Ishiwata, originally to repurpose a large number of units left in stock — very successfully, as it turned out, shipping 2000 ‘LE’ units in its first two weeks of sale. The CD-63 model number was another to get the special treatment, culminating in the legendary CD-63II KI Signature with Ken Ishiwata’s personal tweaks and sign-off, in 1996 becoming the best-selling CD player Marantz had ever produced.
It was the following year that the original founder, Saul B. Marantz, died aged 85 in Somerville, New Jersey.
Marantz today
The current owner of Marantz is Sound United, which purchased Marantz (along with Denon and Boston Acoustics) from D+M Holdings in March 2017; they join brands including Polk Audio and Definitive
Technology. Sound United inherits a strong company at the highest levels of development and performance. There was a great harmonisation of visual style for Marantz products in the first decade of the 21st century, and equally importantly by its 60th anniversary the company was applying its long-held digital expertise to the new era of streaming. The first AirPlay product arrived in 2010, and the first Marantz Network Audio Player was followed by the SR7005 receiver, the company’s first DLNA-certified receiver.
One notably successful series has been the company’s slimline AV receivers, introduced with the NR1501 in 2010, beginning a series of five- and seven-channel receivers which were barely half the height of most receivers on the market. The same year saw Saul Marantz’s original 1950s ‘Consolette’ name-checked in a rather different but very much state-of-the-art luxuriously walnut-backed iPhone-docking speaker of the same name.
The dedication to quality stereo has also continued — Ken Ishiwata celebrated his 30th anniversary of joining Marantz with a pair of ‘limited edition’ KI Pearls, while Special Editions of the 14 Series (pictured left) were released in 2016, continuing the company’s penchant for fine-tuning.
The most recent release with the Ishiwata touch applied is the new Reference 10 Series (above), with the SA-10 SACD/CD player using a drive which has been specially and expensively manufactured by Marantz for this player alone, as well as including USB playback and digital inputs. It pairs with the PM-10 integrated amplifier, which Marantz is on record as considering to be the best integrated amplifier it has ever built — no small feat given the history just related.
It’s no surprise, then, that customers continue to turn to Marantz as the sound-orientated brand among major audio electronics companies. Though as the stated philosophy of Marantz today emphasises, it’s not merely the sound it’s the music.
“The answer lies in our sign-off,” as Marantz’s Terrie O’Connell puts it. “On every piece of printed literature we publish, on every website and every advert, we state — ‘because music matters’.”