I am well into my testing of Marantz’s extraordinarily expensive Horizon wireless speaker – not the bigger Grand Horizon (at £5250 / $5500 / A$9500); I have the lesser but still large standard Horizon (at £3250 / $3500 / $6500, with optional stand).
And it’s quite the object, what with its marble stand, glowing touch ring and optional arty tripod stand, all of which are very much in keeping with the marque’s new tilt at being a ‘luxury’ brand, as contrasted curiously with sister company Denon, which is now being called a ‘performance’ brand. (And what, Marantz isn’t?)
Anyhow, I have been streaming plenty, networking plenty, even listening to Audible plenty through the Horizon, and I have been through all the settings within its HEOS streaming platform, including some EQ for different positioning options. And for sound it has been doing quite well in general: it’s a big powerful wireless speaker, though was sometimes getting somewhat muddled when music was complex, and seemed to brighten or push some elements.
While one 10CC track was playing over the network, with some bits sounding somewhat bright, I investigated the little EQ symbol that appears in the HEOS app next to track playback. Perhaps this would help. It opened a little secondary menu allowing me to change the ‘Sound Mode’.
The Horizon was in ‘Sound Master’ mode, which is labelled as “Tuned for critical listening by the Marantz Sound Master”. And yet changing the Sound Mode away to the ‘Auto’ option nicely softened the excess on the 10CC track – and then proceeded to transform everything that followed, and to correct all that had gone wrong before.
It’s a whole new Horizon
I went back to a Marlena Shaw track (Davy, 'Blue Note', 1974) which had not previously come through well: the bass now rolled out more deeply, and the vocal – heavens, from boxy to pure, no longer lost, no longer confusion. With ‘Auto’ EQ rather than ‘Sound Master’ EQ, Aretha’s Respect suddenly sounded like proper Atlantic soul instead of something slightly processed. A strange thinness to Elton’s piano on Tower of Babel? Now changed to a completely natural tone; his vocal was similarly de-boxed.
And Pearl Jam’s Last Exit suddenly thundered from the Horizon with masses of space in which to let loose: unrestrained, it was.
So while I hesitate to challenge the Sound Master, his or her choice of a slightly pumped up, boxy, even phasey balance seems rather curious, given that switching to ‘Auto’ was transformative for the sound quality. This ‘Auto’ mode is labelled as providing “Balanced sound for all inputs and formats”, and so it does.
Thankfully, Marantz has designated 'Auto' as the default setting for Horizons out of the box. I must have changed it early on; I have no recollection of ever switching it to 'Sound Master', but perhaps I did so early on in testing, attracted by that description of it being "tuned for critical listening", like a high-res mode.
This shows up an inherent hazard when companies include snazzy EQ options that take you away from purity: it's fun to play, but you can get stuck in a mode that is just subtly wrong. ‘Sound Master’ EQ mode, for example, is more like a ‘showroom mode’ for a TV: it’s superficially impressive, but it's actually preventing you from enjoying the Horizon's best level of performance. Yet you might, like me, get stuck in it for the long haul.
Update: When I first wrote this piece, I had thought the Horizon did, in fact, ship with 'Sound Master' as the default, precisely because I had no recollection of changing it. I therefore wrote that this default setting should really be changed, causing the local Marantz team to scurry around checking their boxes and even the coding of the HEOS firmware (which is usefully and proudly developed for the world here in Australia). The team confirmed that 'Auto' should indeed be the default, leaving me looking, as my father used to say, like a right Charlie. My apologies for Marantz for that unmerited suggestion and the subsequent mild panic; I have since rewritten this article.
Sonus Faber's hidden fix
Besides, I should not single out the Sound Master for sole criticism.
Firstly I suspect there was a committee in there somewhere developing that snazzy EQ setting, especially as under the further custom EQ mode you can vary ‘Warmth’, ‘Spaciousness’ and ‘Clarity’, instead of bass, mid and treble, which probably took several meetings (it would have been lunches in the old days) to decide upon.
And secondly it reminded me of another wireless speaker from a good hi-fi name that really did ship stuck with a curious choice of EQ setting. Sonus Faber’s Omnia (pictured below) is another luxurious wireless speaker with a hidden magic button, or rather two of them, as I discovered when testing it for Sound+Image back in 2022.
The Omnia has no app of its own, so I had initially thought it had no access to EQ adjustment at all, as this time the hidden settings are positively obscured. Once you’ve networked the Omnia, you can type its IP address into any browser on the network and reach a page where you can access settings menus. All sorts of useful stuff then becomes available, and under a slightly discouraging ‘advanced settings’ arrow there are, for my money, the two most important controls that the Omnia has.
Both are ‘on’ by default (I'm sure this time...). Given there's only a passing reference to the browser access in a digital brochure (and nothing at all in the quick start guide), that’s probably the way they’ll stay for most users. But I would advise lovers of clarity to seek them out and listen long and hard to the effect they have.
The first relates to Crescendo, which in basic terms turns on and off the Omnia’s side-firing speakers. But there’s more to it than that – “advanced digital signal processing allow our Artisans of Sound to craft a large, open, and enveloping sound… by cleverly mixing stereo signals, adjusting delays, and modifying the phase behaviour of the loudspeakers”.
So the additional drivers are not merely parroting the front left and right channels, in other words; the processing and their dipole effect on response combine to deliver a wider soundscape. But it has a notable effect on tone as well; it enrichens the midrange attractively, but also slightly masks the clarity of a mix. Turning it off immediately reveals the Omnia as capable of a leaner and cleaner sound that some will prefer overall, and some may prefer for certain material.
The second on-off toggle is labelled ‘Loudness Maximizer’, which will ring alarm bells with hi-fi lovers everywhere, and so it should. This builds on the thickening effect of Crescendo in the lower frequencies especially, and to my ears it’s definitely a step too far, with one exception – it can assist the Omnia’s lovely ability to deliver full but low-level listening. Otherwise, I recommend you turn it off; it doesn’t do much at higher volumes anyway, but can certainly introduce bass bloat at medium levels. The busier the track and the more complex the bassline, the better they sounded with the 'Loudness Maximizer' off.
With Crescendo I kept experimenting, sometimes preferring the Omnia’s cleaner native sound, sometimes appreciating the full and wide effect of Crescendo. I just wish there were buttons on the Omnia’s remote control to toggle these on/off, and perhaps the rear two strip lights could be employed to indicate their status; their effect on the sound is important enough to merit highlighting, not hiding.
With all this sorted, I ended up a fan of the Sonus Faber, just as I am now thoroughly enjoying the Horizon (a full Sound+Image review will follow on whathifi.com shortly).
So any time your system isn't sounding quite right, run through your settings and maybe check reviews for any clever option that might be sending things askew. Many soundbars have particularly awful sound mades that can throw them way off treadle, as it were. Or on amplifiers and AV receivers, look for a 'Direct', 'Straight' or 'Pure Direct' mode which can instantly strip away redundant EQ along with shutting down unwanted noisy circuits: sometimes the result can be instant clarity at the press of a button. You just have to find out which button is the magic one.
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