We've just reviewed Marantz's flagship SACD/CD player, the £5000 SA-7S1, in the Temptation section of our September issue - contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, other magazines don't have an exclusive on it - and now the company has released details of the rest of its Legendary flagship hi-fi range.
And mightily impressive it looks too. The full four-box system comes in at £21,999.60, weighs a back-breaking 19 stone and stands almost three feet high.
But this is not a case of style over substance. Far from it. The full system comprises the £5000 SA-7S1 disc player, the £5000 SC-7S2 preamp and two MA-9S2 power amps costing £6000 each.
The technical spec is equally impressive. Each power amp delivers an output of 300W at 8 ohms RMS and 600W at 4 Ohms RMS.
Under the bonnet you'll find newly-developed high-definition amplifier modules (HDAMs) for Super Audio playback, a magnetically shielded toroidal power transformer with dual-stage core (shielding plates of silicon steel sheets in an aluminium case), and a metal chassis with double-layer bottom plate and shock-absorbing feet to help eliminate sound-degrading vibration.
The preamp has a new discrete amp circuit in the input buffer amp, and a dual-stage core toroidal transformer like that used in the power amps. The transformer is secured to the chassis with a 10mm thick aluminium base plate, and Marantz's engineers have paid particular attention to reducing the effect of leakage flux, trace vibration and magnetic bodies on the circuitry.
Suffice to say that the SACD player is built with equal attention to detail, the disc drawer mechanism sitting in a 10mm case of extruded aluminium, while the die-cast metal tray uses micro precision metals to give the cleanest data read-out.
A pair of mono DACs, each with four separate processors, handle DSD and 24-bit PCM audio playback. And the player's analogue and digital sections are completely separated, ensuring analogue signals are free from digital interference.
To find out more, read our full review of the SA-7S1 SACD player in the September issue of What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision, on sale now.
