Well my marantz pm7000n finally arrived. Have about 20 hours on it - using it in office system at work. Setup was a breeze. Literally was streaming Tidal using the pm7000n within 5 minutes of unboxing, and that’s with a firmware update. I already previously had a Heos account established, but still. Easiest out of box to playing music that I’ve seen. Don’t think I’ve had a dropout in 20 hours - using 25 ft cat 8 Ethernet cable (AmazonBasics - $14). Shared office building with around 50 other tenants so I haven’t been able to crank it up yet -- low level volume playing is the norm here.
Performance is better than the Bluesound Powernode 2 in all areas of sound quality, at least to my ears, already. Using Spendor SA1 mini monitors, and occasionally swapping in Kef q150’s. With a Sunfire 8" sub. Is it miles and miles better? No, it’s not. But it’s better for my tastes. Sounds closer to the systems I have at home than did the Powernode. I’m happy with the upgrade.
Bluesound BlueOS is of course better than Heos, because BlueOS is probably better than anything else out there, perhaps Roon excluded (which I haven’t used). But Heos is fine, no problems. All of the different steam interfaces are now getting to be quite similar (I regularly use Lumin, Cambridge StreamMagic, Heos, BlueOS, and have used PlayFi in past (didn’t like that one as much)) -- not as much differentiating them as in the past. Heos is quite similar to Cambridge’s magicstream interface (which I use at home in my secondary system), actually.
Feature-wise, even though the Marantz display is not like my Cambridge Azur 851n with displayed artwork, I find it refreshing to have the display versus the Powernode, which did not have a display. Nice to see the name of the track playing, and the artist, which generally scroll right to left across the screen and are readable from 8 ft away. The pm7000n display is better than the display on my Teac NT-505.
Also, it is really nice to have the remote to change volumes or settings without having to finger-fumble with an iPad screen and possibly inadvertently crank the volume. Just much more tactile satisfying with the remote.
The volumes go from zero upward. There is a volume limit feature, but the lowest setting is 80! That ain’t gonna help me at work, where I’ve not gotten above 20 yet, haha. I liked the Powernode volume range limiting settings much better in that regard.
I was wondering whether the sub output was active when the pm7000n is placed into "source direct" mode, which bypasses the tone controls and purportedly results in a cleaner presentation. I can confirm that it is active (which I am happy about, as the feature would be useless to me had it not been), and that source direct is my preferred mode for streaming. It does sound slightly better, although not a ton of difference. Reason I was wondering is an Integra streaming receiver I have at home for some reason cut the sub output out of the path when a similar mode is engaged there -- the way it works on the marantz is much better. The indicator light for source direct is strangely really extra bright and bold - I wish it correspondingly dimmed with the rest of the display, but oh well.
Only downside (which I was aware of before purchasing) is the much larger footprint that the pm7000n occupies on my desk versus the Powernode. But that’s the class A/B versus D tradeoff, and I’ll happily take it for the sonic benefits.
