Marantz PM-11S3 Manual de instrucciones descargar pdf (Pagina 4)

Australian

ON TEST

Marantz PM-11S3 Integrated Ampliﬁer

be made across the range of 0dB to –100dB

in tiny (0.5dB) steps. Curiously, at minimum

volume the central display ﬁrst shows ‘minus

inﬁnity’, then switches to show ‘MIN’ before

ﬁnally settling on showing ‘–100dB’, while at

the opposite extreme, it shows ‘MAX’ before

reverting to show ‘0dB.’ I can only assume

the engineers had fun programming these

sequences!

Turn the volume control clockwise and

you’ll immediately hear that the Marantz

PM-11S3 is a powerhouse of an ampli-

ﬁer—and that’s even if your speakers are

extraordinarily inefﬁcient. The amount of

ampliﬁer power on tap is truly impressive…

so impressive that I cannot imagine anyone

needing any more power than the PM-11S3

can deliver, even if it’s being used in a room

of well-above-average dimensions. It’s not

just the overall power on tap, it’s also the fact

that even if you’re playing at excessively high

volume levels, the sound of the ampliﬁer is

just as dynamic as it is at whisper-quiet replay

levels, in that when a transient arrives, it’s

delivered perfectly, at ‘way above the average

volume level, with no compression, no hesi-

tation, and without ‘sucking out’ the musical

information immediately before and after the

transient.

Perhaps even more impressive than the

sheer power is the cleanliness and clarity

of that power. There’s none of the artiﬁ-

cial warmth of a valve ampliﬁer, nor the

artiﬁcially simulated warmth of a MOSFET

ampliﬁer, nor the ‘here and there’ sound of a

Class-D ampliﬁer, nor the steely hardness of

a poorly-designed bipolar ampliﬁer. There’s

just an outpouring of clean, beautifully

articulated music, as if it were bursting forth

from the instruments themselves, except

highly ampliﬁed. Did someone say ‘straight

wire with gain’? If not, it would be a highly

accurate description of what’s going on inside

the Marantz PM-11S3.

All this power and precision would be

for naught if the ampliﬁer were not quiet,

and the PM-11S3 is certainly this, because

when the music stops, you’ll hear absolutely

nothing from your speakers. No faint hiss,

no background hum, not even a ‘blackness’

that might indicate a total absence of sound.

Instead, you won’t hear anything except

the background noise of your own listening

room. No doubt it’s this silence that contrib-

utes to the dynamics, so that not only are

the differences between loud and soft notes

clearly delineated, but also the differences

between soft notes and no notes at all. It’s a

type of silence that I don’t think ampliﬁers

with on-board DACs can equal.

All of this makes the PM-11S3 a very

revealing ampliﬁer, one that will reward

you beyond measure if you feed it truly

hi-res source material, but one that’s su-

perbly revealing if you feed it well-recorded

16-bit/44.1kHz fare direct from CD. One such

is a favourite recording of mine, as well as

a favourite of the late Chris Green, previ-

ous assistant editor—and reviewer—here at

Australian Hi-Fi Magazine, who was a huge

Cyndi Boste fan. I’m talking about her 2004

album ‘Scrambled Eggs’ (Rose St Sessions),

mostly recorded in her own home direct to

DAT by Rob Harwood, and featuring Linda

and Vika Bull, Dave Steel, Tiffany Eckhart,

Garrett Costigan and a clutch of other musi-

cal luminaries.

Scrambled Eggs is at heart a collection of

Boste’s favourite songs written by her friends,

most of whom contribute to this album, and

it’s a beautiful album on so many levels. The

songs themselves, of course, but there’s the

obvious love with which they’re played…

you can hear instantly that this is truly

music-making, in every sense of the words,

as if they’re playing not simply to ‘make an

album’ but to honour the music itself. Then

there’s the recording, which is an object les-

son into why music should not be overpro-

duced: the sound on this CD is so clean and

natural that the musicians could be playing

in your home live, not issuing through your

speakers. Yes, there are some rough edges,

some unwanted rattles and distortions (on

Bridges especially), and many ﬂuctuations in

level, but if anything, these all just add to the

undeniable authenticity of the sound.

And wait until you hear one of the three

Boste originals on this album. She does a

completely new take on No Way Out (origi-

nally on her album ‘Home Truths’), and for

mine, this is the deﬁnitive version, by a long

shot. It’s gorgeous. (The other two tracks were

recorded live at the Port Pirie folk festival,

and I prefer the versions she recorded at

Fatsound that can be heard on ‘Push Comes

to Shove’, in terms of both sound quality

and performance.) Make a point of buying

Scrambled Eggs: you’ll love the singers and

love their songs.

Ampliﬁer/speaker matching is a sore point

with many audiophiles, particularly those

who ﬁnd that their newly-purchased speakers

aren’t a great match for their ampliﬁer, or

that their newly-purchased ampliﬁer doesn’t

turn out to be a synergistic match with their

existing loudspeakers. You won’t have to

worry about ampliﬁer/speaker matching if

you buy the Marantz PM-11S3, because I

found it worked perfectly with all the speak-

ers I tried it with, and some of them were

famously difﬁcult. In essence, the ampliﬁer’s

sound was transparent to the speakers: I was

hearing the intrinsic sound of the speakers

themselves, not the combination of both.

This is signiﬁcant, because for many people,

I’d bet that the PM-11S3 will be the very last

ampliﬁer they buy!

ConCLusion

This ampliﬁer does so many things right that

it’s almost as if the designers had a tick-box

from an audiophile’s wish list and worked

away until they’d ticked all the boxes. Yes, it

has a few little quirks, but if anything, I think

these actually add to the Marantz PM-11S3’s

desirability. This is an ampliﬁer that will, truly,

‘knock your socks off.’

greg borrowman

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