The opening of the well-known Teutonic audio fair made it possible to appreciate, on the inaugural day, the new premium audio products that the Marantz and Denon brands have in store.
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During the day one of the High-End Munich 2022 event, several brands presented their premium audio devices, including (to quote those of the parent company Sound United) Denon, which unveiled two stereo amplifiers and an advanced CD player, and Marantz who made the 60 CD player official.
Starting from Denon, the first product brought to the attention of the market consisted of the PMA-900HNE (June, € 1,999): it is an amplifier with anti-vibration devices, explained in ABS resin feet, steel plates of 1 mm, and 6-block structure. which incorporates a Burr-Brown PCM1795 accredited DAC of 140W x 2 into 4 ohms or 70W x 2 into 8 ohms of power, harmonic distortion of 0.01, and support for high-resolution playback (384 kHz / 32 -bit in PCM).
The algorithms of the Advanced AL32 Processing Plus technology reconstruct a waveform close to that of the original signal, while the Analog Mode function prevents the digital section from affecting the digital section with its circuits and the Source Direct function bypasses the intervention on the source signal . Associable with two speakers, the PMA-900HNE includes a coaxial, two optical digital inputs, 1 output and 3 analog inputs on RCA, 1 EXT.PRE type input if you intend to use an external pre-amplifier.
The PMA-900HNE (July, 999 euros), always structured to minimize vibrations, starting from the Signal Level Divided Construction that manages the signal paths, is an amplifier that integrates an Advanced HC Single Push-Pull architecture which is power of 2x85W / 4 ohm or 2x50W / 8ohm, always with an insignificant harmonic distortion of the signal (0.01%). There are Apple AirPlay 2 connectivity, dual band Wi-Fi ac and Bluetooth, streaming from Spotify, Deezer, TuneIn, Amazon Music, compatibility with Assistant and Alexa, support for Roon Ready standards and, at high altitude, multi-room , Heos.
Among the ports, there is no shortage of sub and pre outputs, one for turntables with MM or MC cartridges, three analog inputs, four S / PDIF inputs and one USB Type-A (with charge at 5 V, 1 A and support for liquid music).
A worthy companion to this amplifier is the DCD-900NE CD player (June, 499 euros). This device minimizes interference by shortening the signal paths and reduces vibrations with structural measures, such as the transformer located towards the bottom: equipped as a DAC with a 32-bit ESS, and the AL32 Processing Plus that takes care of upsampling by reconstructing the shape analogue waveform, from the USB Type-A on the front it supports music in high resolution, while the CD mechanism also reads rewritable CDs (only once R, or several times RW) with a predisposition towards audio formats with loss of quality ( WMA, AAC and MP3) or without (ALAC, FLAC, DSD, AIFF). The preservation of the purity of the analog sound is achievable with the Pure Direct function which turns off the digital outputs and the display to avoid impact on the analog section: finally, on the level of the ports, there are the digital ones (coaxial and optical) and the RCA.
From Marantz comes the CD player 60 (June, 799 euros). The latter has a 1 mm thick metal sheet chassis, with a reinforced antivibration bottom and front stylistically borrowed from the Model 40n amplifier, due to the use of a flat front plate and sides – with texture – slightly concave: again at a structural level , there is a symmetrical location, on the sound card, of the Hyper Dynamic Amplifier Modules (HDAM) circuit and of the EI transformer so that, having drawn a more direct path for the signal, at high frequencies they touch less distortions.
Due to the ESS ES9016K2M analog to digital converter, signal samplings up to 5.6 MHz in DSD and up to 192 kHz at 24-bit are managed: the sound performance can, however, benefit from two ad hoc digital filters. When listening with headphones, the HDAM-SA2 circuit (with three gain levels) and an amplifier intervene, which can be excluded – if not used – to avoid interference.
Also in this case the CD mechanism reads the optical media that can be remastered one or more times containing songs in MP3 and WMA formats while, as regards the USB Type-A port on the front, the same reads pens formatted in the fat16 / 32 file systems, containing songs in lossy formats (MP3, WMA and AAC) or loseless (WAV, FLAC, ALAC, AIFF and DSD).