Tech Expert Holiday Gift Guide

7. Marantz SR5004 Receiver

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Marantz SR5004

There’s nothing like setting up a home-theater system to remind you that consumer electronics and computing still exist in radically different markets. The last time I set up a home theater from top to bottom was in the early part of this decade—before Blu-ray or HDMI or many other elements that have been patched and adapted onto my old Yamaha amplifier. I was excited to see what could be had for under $1,000 heading into this holiday season and finally picked the Marantz SR5004 with a bit of sentimentality creeping in since I grew up on my dad’s rack of Marantz components.

Now, one of the hot-selling points of the SR5004 is that it’s Bluetooth-compatible if you shell out $130 for the Bluetooth module. (This module comes included with the $1,249 SR6004, which also features a USB port.) The idea is that you can stream audio straight from your Bluetooth-enabled MP3 players or cell phones. At first, I was very disappointed that I’d overlooked getting the module to try this out, and then I realized the obvious. Why settle for a potentially shoddy wireless connection when I can stream my entire audio collection into my home theater via my Media Center-enabled Xbox 360, which uses a wired-LAN connection and a TOSlink digital audio feed?

No, the SR5004 made a lot more sense given my existing LAN setup. Speaking of setup, I’d read that the SR5004 would be a “quick-and-easy” affair. I’d had an A/V installer put in my home theater the last time we moved, and I’d forgotten just how different A/V consumer electronics are from computing gear. It was not quick and easy. It was a Gordian knot of cabling. It was me realizing that I should have had my installer make every cable two feet longer so I could pull components out of my cabinet and work on them without disconnecting everything. It was me fighting back a stream of profanity around my kids, wondering how on Earth the A/V community could have possibly standardized on such poor connections as spring-loaded screw posts for speaker wires and HDMI jacks that practically come loose if you so much as blow on them.

This is not Marantz’s fault. Nor am I going to fault the company for having a TV-based input setup routine that would have been considered primitive in the days of Windows 3.1. The fact that an amplifier has any on-screen setup still makes me giddy. But I’ll warn you now: If you’ve grown soft and lazy from years of auto-sensing jacks and plug-and-play, then you’re in for some trial and error. You have to fill out a grid that links which input device is using which specific port on the amplifier’s connection array, and it’s not as intuitive as it sounds. I ran into trouble when I came in with four TOSlink-based devices and discovered up to five supported in the GUI, but only found three physical TOSlink ports on the amp. There were several times when I could see a device on one setting but hear it on another. If you’ve stayed practiced with A/V receivers in recent years, you’ll probably sail through this. If you’ve coming in as a PC-only person, you’ll face a learning curve.

That said, the SR5004 is so worth mastering. The audio that came out of it was dramatically better than what I was used to from my Yamaha. I honestly didn’t think my in-wall speakers could sound that good. Audio was clearer, the faint bit of noise I’d been used to at loud volumes vanished, and the quality of psychoacoustic channel separation was an unbelievable improvement given that my front-three speakers are all located above my plasma screen (required because of my in-wall bookshelves). No doubt, these improvements were assisted by the SR5004's automated Audessey speaker calibration, facilitated by a tethered microphone you can position in up to six listening locations throughout your environment. Then you swing in and enable any of the many EQ effects that Marantz builds in: Dolby ProLogic Iix, DTS:NEO 6, SRS Dialog, and more. You get tools for volume leveling (so you don’t go from quiet dialog to blasting commercials), integrated video scaling from SD to HD resolutions, HDMI Lip Sync (to make sure audio and video stay synchronized over a HDMI 1.3 connection), and much more. The amp supports XM and Sirius receivers and takes three HDMI, two component, and four composite video inputs.

To wrap up the basic specs, the SR-5004 is a 7.1 receiver with 90 W per channel. Every channel has its own 192 KHz/24-bit D/A and A/D converter. Supported sound formats include Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital EX, Dolby ProLogic IIz, Dolby Headphone, and dts-HD. There’s two-zone analog output plus a third zone via digital output. The 10-bit video processing looks fabulous. I spent half of a day getting my entire home theater configured to perfection on the SR-5004, but it was worth it. The simplicity of having a single HDMI output combined with Marantz’s amazing fidelity and feature depth would be enough to give anyone a case of the Christmas jollies. --William Van Winkle