That's enough about my old receiver. Time to introduce my new AVR, Marantz NR1403.
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| Never mind the dust and bad wire management. |
It's a slimline AVR with a lot of nice features. You can find the features at their website below.
Marantz NR1403 Website
It sounds great! My favorite features are Dynamic Volume and Power-On Level.
Dynamic volume is a sort of automatic level adjustment that evens out the audio level to reduce large volume increases and it brings the level up during quiet scenes. I live in an apartment so this is really handy, not to mention Hollywood these days seems to have a real hard-on for loud effects scenes and swells in the music. I only wish the "heavy" setting was slightly heavier. I still sometimes have to turn down the volume for some scenes. Another feature which is nice, is the ability to turn off the volume indicator in the OSD. So when I do need to adjust the volume during a movie, I don't need to see the giant volume level indicator on the bottom of the screen. They seem to have thought through their features.
The power on level feature insures that you dont blast yourself out of the room if you powered off the unit with the volume turned up.
I don't really use the HDMI switching, I only use one HDMI input the rest of my inputs are run into the TV and passed through as optical.
I don't think this should unit should be bought by someone that wants a simple set-and-forget AVR. It has lots of settings and the manual needs to be read in order to set things up properly. There are lots of menus to get lost in. You will definitely want to use the OSD when configuring the unit for the first time.
I've used Marantz in the professional world and always thought they were decent quality goods. This unit is heavy for how small it is. Which hopefully means it's packed with quality components.
The set-up microphone seems to work really well. I feel like it balanced out the room nicely, and since I currently have an eclectic collection of speakers it's nice to have a way to bring them all together.
I feel like with this unit, you are getting a lot of the features of their higher end models but at a entry level AVR price. Marantz seems like the kind of company that doesn't make you pay for every little bell or whistle.
I think I'll be getting years of good use out of this AVR.
