Marantz cd6005 cd Player
Cd player
The performance of the CD6005 is nothing short of miraculous: it’s time to upgrade your existing player!
If you have not upgraded your CD player for a few years, you’re missing out on better sound from all the CDs you already own, not to mention missing out on operational features you may not have known were available! Plus, if you buy new discs, you’ll find that having them contain CD-Text as a bonus is now the rule, rather than the exception. Best of all, as you’ll discover when you read on, you can get all this without breaking the bank.
The equipmenT
Marantz was one of the first manufacturers to build a CD player and is now one of the few left that’s still making them. What impresses me the most about the company is that despite having the field largely to itself, the company is not resting on its laurels, but is still continually improving the performance of its machines and adding features, whilst at the same time maintaining features that you’ll rarely find on any other CD players, irrespective of their price, and the Marantz CD6005 is a perfect example of this.
Let’s look at disc-handling first, because the Marantz CD6005 not only plays CDs, CD-Rs and CD-RW discs, but will also play discs you have created on your computer by burning MP3 and WMA files.
It does this with a new tray-loading transport (eschewing the slot-loaders that are becoming more popular, possibly because Marantz makes its own transports, whereas most other manufacturers source their slotloading transports from Teac).
I couldn’t see any visible differences from the trays I’ve seen on previous CD players from Marantz, so I had to make a telephone call to Qualifi, the Australian distributor, to find out what was new and it turns out that both the disc drive motor and the tray drive motor have been improved, along with various linkage mechanisms. When I got around to using the tray, it appears the new motors and linkages have certainly improved performance slightly, with the new tray’s open/close operations being a little quicker than I had timed the old ones at and, although I don’t keep records of the ‘noisiness’ of tray motors or drive motors
(except to mention in reviews if they happen to be intrusively noisy) it seemed to me that this new tray-loader was a little quieter in operation than usual.
The USB input on the front panel handles MP3, WMA, AAC, and WAV files and has sufficient current delivery to charge an iPad, even if you’ve switched the CD6005 to standby, or if it switches itself to standby, which it will do by itself automatically if you haven’t used it for a while. (The auto-standby mode is switchable, so you can disable it if you don’t want the player to switch to standby mode. When it is in standby mode, it will draw less than half a watt from your mains power supply (so long as it’s not charging an iDevice).
The CD6005 uses a Cirrus Logic CS4398, which is a 24-bit/192kHz stereo DAC that uses oversampled multibit Delta-Sigma architecture, but with a shaping technology that eliminates distortion due to capacitor mismatching. (This excellent DAC has also been ‘trickled down’ to the lower-priced CD5005, presumably so Marantz—now part of D&M Holdings, which also owns Denon— can buy these DACs from Cirrus Logic in much larger quantities, and thus benefit from lower unit pricing.)
Marantz makes much in its promotional literature of its use of what it calls ‘HDAMs’ and now offers them in a variety of performance grades. HDAM stands for Hyper Dynamic Amplifier Module and is a type of operational amplifier (a.k.a. ‘op-amp’). An operational amplifier is a voltage amplifier with a differential input and a single-ended output that produces an output hundreds of thousands of times larger than the potential difference between its input terminals. All CD player manufacturers use op-amps (they’re one of the most-used devices in electronics!) but most of them use standard ‘off-the-shelf’ op-amps, packaged as integrated circuits, which cost only a few cents each.
Marantz’s HDAM is an op-amp that is built using proper circuit boards populated with discrete surface-mount components, with short mirror image left/right signal paths, which are then packaged before being inserted into the main printed circuit boards
The Marantz CD6005 features one of my all-time favourite operational features, and one that’s super-rare to find on any CD player these days: a pitch control!
(PCBs). Although Marantz’s HDAMs perform exactly the same electronic function as ordinary mass-produced op-amps, Marantz says its customised HDAMs have faster slew rates and much lower noise levels than conventional IC op-amps, to deliver improved audio performance.
The front-panel is almost the same as all other Marantz CD (and SACD) players, which is great because it means there are sufficient front-panel controls to allow you to use the CD6005 without any need to reach for the remote control. So you’ll find ‘Stop’, ‘Play/ Pause’, Track Skip Forward/Reverse and FastForward/Fast Reverse are all there, either side of the disc tray drawer. All advanced features are accessed with the remote.
Marantz now provides its Owners’ Manuals as interactive files on CD-ROM. You can print them out if you want, but the interactive pdf format used is simply fabulous, as everything is hyper-linked, so if, on the contents ‘page’ you click on anything you want to know more about, such as ‘Playing an iPod’, the hyperlink will take you directly to that page in the manual. There are also tabs at the top and bottom of each page that take you directly to the Contents page, or to the Index page… or wherever you want to go. Using the pdf manual is actually faster and more convenient than using a printed manual.
In Use and Performance
The Marantz CD6005 features one of my all-time favourite operational features, and one that’s super-rare to find on any CD player these days: a pitch control! This is exactly what its name suggests it is: a control that allows you to adjust the pitch of any CD you’re playing. What earthly use is this? If you’re a musician, you’d already know that such a control will allow you to make adjust the pitch of the CD you’re playing so that it’s exactly ‘in tune’ with the instrument you’re using to play along with the CD. Although it’s possible to re-tune stringed instruments (and most woodwinds and brass) to the correct pitch to play along with a CD, it’s obviously impossible to do with a piano (well, not impossible, but certainly impractical), it’s inconvenient, because every CD you play will very likely be very slightly ‘out of tune’. It will be so because many bands tune their instruments so they’re in tune with each other, but not necessarily at what’s called ‘concert pitch’ where the frequency of the note ‘A’ above middle C is exactly 440Hz. In other cases, you may find a recording engineer has adjusted the speed of a performance to fit a particular time (very common back in the days of the LP), which also has an effect on pitch (by raising or lowering it). If you’re not a musician, you won’t know that musicians often ‘play along’ with CDs to learn musical pieces.