Marantz - Cinema 70S 50W 7.2-Ch Bluetooth Capable with HEOS 8K Ultra HD HDR Compatible A/V Home Theater Receiver with Alexa - Black

This unit is ideally suited for pairing with an external amp to drive your front speakers, while using the built-in amplifiers to power surround. What channels have powered amplifiers and what are pre-out only is user configurable. Sounds great for both music and cinema. I use the 12v trigger output to drive a relay that turns on and off my front channel amp and subwoofer. The room configuration system includes a microphone with a long cord, and did a good job but-for overemphasizing subwoofer bass (easy to adjust). The unit has a fair amount of built-in intelligence, making use intuitive. The remote has a button actuated backlight. Due to all the configuration options, the backpanel can get a little cluttered, so consider adding banana lugs to rear channel speaker cables to make your life easier. The unit comes with adhesive labels for tagging your cables, which helps. Before dumping an excessive amount of cash on a dedicated preprocessor and buying additional amplification for your rear channels, take a hard look at this unit, as it offers a unique alternative while still affording audiophile quality.

I needed a rackmountable small form factor AV Receiver with Dolby Atmos. At 50 watts per channel its fine for a small room and can be used with preouts to amplifiers. Thats flexable and works well for a product in this price range. So far, so good.

Marantz makes an incredible sounding receiver and paired well with my B&W speakers.

Absolutely fantastic unit! I needed to upgrade my Sonos AMP for a proper AVR due to lack of HDMI ports. Paired with KEF LS50 Meta bookshelf speakers along with KEF KC62 Sub this thing performs great and supports any type of modern decoding. Lack of 1440p support for PS5 (can do 1080p and 4K) is not heart breaking but I haven't seen AVRs on the market that support it natively. Integration with Apple TV, Turntable and other stuff is fantastic too and QMS, auto switching and Audyssey (yes I would prefer DIRAC live but at this price point is impossible) is fantastic and overall I am very happy. Keep in mind that due to slim form factor, you only get 50W per channel so make sure your speakers are efficient. I keep my volume at between 50-65 (out of 98 available) and eventually will add a center speaker and remaining speakers to complete 7.2 setup. Even initial setup and confirmation was great, app is responsive and all on screen setup and settings menus are in 4K which is welcome as well. HEOS works great for music and with multi zone and multi sub support you can really create interesting setups. Again, coming from SONOS AMP which was simple to operate but lacked advanced control for its phantom center channel - often vocals in movies would end up muffled due to poor mastering or mastering in general for surround only. Cinema 70s improved the clarity to a point where in the near future I dont need to even look into a center channel.

I had the previous model NR1710, which had developed major issues that forced me to replace it. Although I really didn't want to spend $1200 on a new receiver, the good news is this receiver not only has a more attractive look and build quality, it has a faster user interface when changing settings, faster HDMI handshake when using video pass through, and it has multiple pre-outs with the ability to set the receiver to allow the external amp(s) to handle the load, keeping the receiver cool when it's not doing the amplification. It also has some additional audio features available within the app options, like dialogue enhancement that I've found quite handy for those movies or shows where dialogue is sometimes buried in the mix and hard to understand. It even has different levels of enhancement you can choose from. The sound quality for movies/music is excellent. The HEOS music streaming feature may be better sounding than the NR1710, but I can't say for sure. It'll sound good to most people, but its functionality does have some minor issues if you have your music collection stored on a NAS that doesn't use a particular server application. Overall, I'm quite happy with this new slimline Marantz model and I would recommend it if you live in a smaller place, like an apartment, or have your system located in a small to medium sized area. It'll provide enough power and features for most average needs, and if more amp power is needed, you'll have the ability to connect external amps for multiple speakers using the pre-outs.