Marantz MA-500 Mono Blocks

mantis
mantis Posts: 17,194
Hello all,
I have owned these amps for quite some time now. I've basically used them to power my Garage Speakers and my Deck speakers from Sonos Connect's as zones. Though the years I've changed amps to Niles and I still have my Elan Z amps which are 6 channel amps. I have a few of those.
The Marantz MA-500's where just sitting on my shelf in my basement collection of equipment and I was cleaning down there and saw them just chillin. Then I got the bright idea to try out 2 of them just for my front speakers to see how they would sound for the sheer hell of it.
I connected them to my Sony STRZA5000ES receiver pre out with Audioquest Big Sir analog IC's connecting the main channels with Audioquest Rocket 44's.
I have a new SACD player coming ( Oppo 203) and I've been messing around with the Sony UDPX700 SACD player and think it's a fine player for the money. It's connected for audio with Audioquest Carbon HDMI.
After a quick tweak in calibration I sat down to listen to the Mono Blocks. Well They sound smooth and quite clean. I have 5 of them so I can easily power 5 of my speaker channels with them if I choose. I'm going Atmos which will be configured 5.2.2 in a 5.1.2 setup line level.
Nothing more fun then playing around with mono blocks and music. Sometimes you gotta get away from video which I have been deep into HDR and Dolby Vision.
As much as I love theater , new technology etc it's nice to just take a break and enjoy some music.
I've done theaters in the past with Marantz Mono Blocks and always liked what I heard. Almost never really listened to them with music other then my In wall Polk RC-85i's which live in the garage and polk Atrium 6's I have on the Deck. Yes they always sounded warm and powerful and the Ariums are nice as I like to sit on the deck with wine and chill with some tunes with the wife around a fire. but these mono's are very musical and so nice to listen to. I'm gonna enjoy them all over again.mg661e6eu7u8.jpg
Dan
My personal quest is to save to world of bad audio, one thread at a time.