Posted Tue Dec 6, 2016 at 11:15 AM PST by Steven Cohen
Two new audio components have been revealed.
Marantz has announced the latest additions to its home audio lineup. The SA-10 SACD/CD player/DAC and PM-10 amplifier are part of the company's Premium 10 series, offering top of the line performance that Marantz simply describes as "The New Reference."
The SA-10 serves as a successor to the previously released SA-7, providing several new features. The device can play SACD, CD, DVD-R/RW and CD-R/RW discs, including high-resolution audio stored on either CD or DVD recordable media through its specially designed SACD-M3 disc drive. In addition, the player is also a state-of-the-art digital-to-analog converter which uses unique technology to extract every last nuance from digital music files through discs and external sources connected to the player’s digital inputs. The tech is called Marantz Musical Mastering, a brand-new two-stage process (MMM-Conversion and MMM-Stream) that actually upconverts the audio to DSD256 -- allowing the device to be the first player/USB converter without a traditional DAC.
Senior Electronics Engineer Rainer Finck has been working on Marantz Reference CD players for two decades, and was central to the SA-10 project. According to Rainer
"As I was one of the Philips engineers way back in the late 80s, and worked on the company’s Bitstream converters – the last one was the DAC-7 – we could draw on all this knowledge to build our own bitstream converter for the SA-10."
Meanwhile, the PM-10 is an integrated amplifier with an all-analog design, and a dual-mono construction with switching power amplification to deliver 200Wpc into 8ohms, and 400Wpc into 4ohms. In addition, the device uses Marantz's Hyper-Dynamic Amplifier Modules (or HDAMs) for superior sound quality. Likewise, the PM-10 includes separate power supplies for the preamplifier and each of the power amplifier channels, along with a dedicated supply for the microprocessor controlling volume adjustment, input selection, and other components.
The Marantz SA-10 SACD/CD player/DAC ($6,999) and PM-10 amplifier ($7,999) are expected to start shipping in January.
Source: Marantz
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