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The Marantz BD7004 is the company’s second-generation Blu-ray deck, and with a £700 price tag it’s aimed squarely at home cinema die-hards. But does it justify that wallet-busting price tag? Read our full Marantz BD7004 review and find out.
The Marantz BD7004’s spec sheet certainly makes for good reading – it’s equipped for BD Live, decodes Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio and supplies 1080/24p pictures to your HD gogglebox. But so does every other Blu-ray deck these days, so what makes the Marantz so special? Build quality, that’s what.
Weighing 4.9kg and fitted with a metal plate in the top cover, the Marantz BD7004 is built to last. Its rigid bodywork could stop a rhino in its tracks, but more importantly it’s designed to minimise vibrations that could impinge on performance. Its chunky frame will dominate your AV rack but the moody black finish and curved fascia mean you’ll probably want it to.
Read our Sony BDP-360 review now
The internal design on the Marantz BD7004 is distinctly high-end too. Pictures are processed by Anchor Bay’s well-regarded VRS chip and the component video output benefits from a 297MHz/12-bit DAC.
The Marantz BD7004’s rear panel is teeming with connections. There’s a set of 7.1-channel analogue outputs that feed decoded HD audio to your amp, as well as an Ethernet port for hooking up to the internet. For this sort of cash, Wi-Fi should have been a shoo-in but sadly you’re stuck with a wired connection.
To rub salt in the wound, you have to load up an SD card into the front-mounted slot to store downloads, which means extra expense and hassle – a bit cheeky when the LG BD390 offers Wi-Fi and 1GB of built-in memory for around a third of the price.
Thankfully the Marantz BD7004 makes up for that with healthy format support – as well as MP3, WMA, JPEG and AVCHD playback (via SD card or disc), the Marantz also plays DivX HD, giving you even more hi-def content to choose from.
Picture quality is sensational. The Marantz BD7004 transferred our Monsters Vs Aliens disc to screen without a pixel out of place, rendering the CG action with unbelievable sharpness and some of the deepest colours ever witnessed. 24fps motion is fluid and VRS’s impeccable upscaling means DVDs are free from artefacts too. On the sonic tip, decoded movie soundtracks are flawless and music-wise it’ll give dedicated CD players a run for their money.
So if you prize build quality and performance over features then the Marantz BD7004 will be money well spent, but otherwise the Wi-Fi equipped LG BD390 offers much better value.
