Marantz vs. Arcam

Thanks, @soix - As you may have read, I’m trying to avoid the really big mistakes I made before with Onkyo and Emotiva.  Also, the latest offerings from Arcam seem pretty good expecially since I plan to use external amps or powered speakers.  A $2k all in one may very well be my next purchase.

I agree with your marantz & arcam comparison. The Yamaha is great too with very good eq possibilities. Also the Yamaha i'm told has better reliability as told by my installer. 
 I'm an Arcam user & but recently i heard the anthem receiver. It sounds much better  to me , better resolution , bass & coherence ,
Should be certainly considered .

All the best 

@neoshah Thanks. I have a modern Anthem and the EQ limitations is making me look elsewhere. In particular, I want to hand craft what the EQ does, and the Anthem has no such feature.  The more advanced Marantz units and DirecLive should give me full manual parametric EQ capabilities.

@erik_squires Hey! Anthem does have a room correction software. Although not sure how it compares to Dirac in the Arcam.

Guess best to stick with what ones comfortable with. 

Cheers 

@neoshah I’m not pleased with the EQ settings Anthem’s room correction makes. Unfortunately I didn’t pay more attention to the details. While it has many configuration options it does not let me have what I most desire: Hand crafted parametric EQ settings. As a result I have a pair of miniDSP units behind my Anthem MRX receiver, and have completely disabled the Anthem Room Correction.

I believe that DiracLive lets me hand adjust EQ settings without having to rely on it’s room correction if I wish. I believe the advanced Audyssey EQ in some Marantz units also let me do this. I'm also shifting more towards powered DSP capable speakers as well.

I’m looking to simplify my listening experience which has shifted greatly from music to movies over the past couple of years. One thing I look forward to in doing so is reducing the number of separate devices I have right now from 6 (HT receiver, 2 channel integrated, DAC, streamer, 2x miniDSP) to 1.