The Admonitor--Comments on Current Ads (Vol.1, No.5: Winter 1977/78)

Editor's Note: Is it a coincidence, is it our imagination, or could it possibly be the cumulative effect of this column? (No, it couldn't be ... ) The fact remains that, since the last go-around, we've seen a drop in the outrageous technical claims and denials of the laws of nature in national hi-fi advertising.

In fact, the item below is the only one that has seriously stirred up our critical juices lately.

Marantz 940 Back in the 1960's, the name Marantz was synonymous with the world's finest audio equipment. Even today, the Model 7C pre amp, the Model 9 power amp, the Model 10B tuner of that period sell at a substantial premium on the secondhand market. People like Mitch Cotter, Sid Smith, Dick Sequerra, Julius Futterman and others of their perfection ist bent were involved in the design of the equipment, and Saul Marantz saw to it that nothing left the factory with his name on it that wasn't the very best. The comedown after Saul was bought out by Superscope was almost immediate, but it took quite a few years before Marantz became indistinguishable in product quality, image and advertising from Pioneer, Sansui and other large Japanese hi-fi companies. Today the process is complete and Marantz's advertising is, if anything, more heavy-handed and "buckeye" than any other Japanese mass merchant's.

Their latest series of four-color double page spreads ("Ultimately It's Marantz. Go For It.") is particularly shrill and ob noxious, and among these the one on the Marantz 940 speaker system (top model of the Marantz Design Series) really has us going up the wall.

The first paragraph of the copy announces "the sharpest, cleanest instrument definition you've ever heard from any speaker system." (Guess we'll have to trade in our Beveridge.) The third paragraph explains that the crossover network of the Marantz 940, by virtue of its six (count them) inductors and three level controls, is the most sophisticated ever and assures you of precise crossover points, smooth transitions and flat frequency response. And here we were, believing that the more complex the crossover, the more difficult it is to control those very characteristics; but live and learn.

(Maybe they're compensating their network with all-pass filters, Papoulis sections or something, right? Fat chance, for $400 ... ) But it's the sales pitch on the woofer, further below, that takes the booby prize. "The big bass drum is heard in all its glory because Marantz builds woofers with a rigid new cone material-rigid enough to withstand ten times the force that can destroy a light airplane.

This superior structural strength enables the cone to move in an ideal piston-like motion, instead of bending. Which means a tight low frequency response and uncolored sound quality." This is pure taurine excrement.

We must admit that it upsets us so much because we've heard it before; rigidity as an argument for woofer quality is one of the more common techno-illiteracies of today's audio scene. The truth of the matter is that rigidity is a high-frequency requirement, not a low frequency one. The best woofer cones are soft, pulpy and lossy. "Piston-like motion" at, say, 100 Hz can be obtained with a woofer made of mucus; it has nothing to do with "structural strength' but with the ratio of the cone radius to the wavelength. It's when the woofer cone has extended high-frequency response (thanks to rigidity!) that you run into the problem of sonic colorations and need a complex, steep cutoff crossover section to counteract the problem.

The ad also pushes the Marantz "Vari-Q" feature, about which we always had the gravest misgivings (it isn't new in this model). It consists of a removable foam plug, so you can convert a sealed-box woofer into a vented box. The trouble is that it isn't mathematically possible to convert a properly aligned sealed box to a properly aligned vented box simply by opening up a hole in it, without any changes in the driver design or the box dimensions.

Either one or the other alignment will be wrong; in the case of the Marantz we'd expect both to be wrong. Removing the plug undoubtedly changes the speaker into an uncontrolled, high-Q boom box; in fact the ad talks about "the gutsiest low end for today's electronic rock." From our consumerist point of view, the worst kind of hi-fi ad is the long-copy, pop tech kind that has the surface appearance of educating the reader but is actually designed to mess up his head so he'll think that (a) he now has some solid technical information and (b) the product meets the technical criteria he has just learned about. This is that kind of ad. Yechh.

We just hope that every man, woman and child with the slightest interest in audio knows by now that Marantz is no longer the Marantz.

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[adapted from TAC]

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Also see:

A Sampling of Headphones with Audiophile Aspirations --- Fontek Minifon A-4 ; Koss 'Auditor' Dynamic/10 ; Koss 'Auditor' ESP/10 ; Stax SR-X/Mark 3 ; Stax SR-5 ; Yamaha HP-1

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines