This video popped up in my Youtube feed yesterday and given the discussion here, I watched it:
It definitely agrees with BD's comments about Sony's house sound. The descriptions in that video of the Sony and the Marantz agree with how I remember both of them. My family had one of the smaller Marantz receivers from the same period for a long time and my best friend's family had a lot of Sony stereo equipment from the 80s and 90s. It's too bad the guy who made the video isn't an electronics engineer/technologist/test equipment geek. If it was me putting those two receivers up against each other and I heard that difference, they'd both have gotten carted downstairs and put them on the bench with the 8903B and sweep them to get some hard and fast numbers to see if Sony goosed the ends of the frequency response to tailor the sound compared to the Marantz.
Anyhow, I did shoot some unboxing video of the 34401A and the S-A-A-2N/TinySA packages. The camcorder wasn't a Sony though! If there's interest, I can try to stitch something together and toss it online later if anybody wants to see.
I'm not at all surprised by his conclusion here, the Marantz receiver has now for many years been considered to be one of the top hi-fi units you can get and that quality shone through just be looking at the 2 side by side and looking inside did not disappoint either and the sheer smoothness of the sound said it all. The Sony uses IC's to reduce the cost and IC's lend themselves to machine assembly and the Marantz, clearly much more complex to assemble, was hand built.
I won one of those Sony receivers on eBay recently for repair and the sound quality when repaired ready for flipping again was just described and after extended soak tests it was becoming clear the bass was very muddied, more like a one note samba, the mid-range was just about right and the high notes too bright. Just from that short experience of the modern Sony, it was enough to turn off them for ever as well.
One of the best budget (top end of the budget) range in the 70s to 80s was Nippon Sound, fully discrete alloy and wood cabinets but these amps and receivers kicked some arse I can tell you. Not sure what happened to them, but I have a hunch that they became Yamaha but not sure.
I remember the Marantz 22xx line well. Actually, I have one downstairs that was a garage find that's waiting to go on the bench plus my family had one for many years when I was growing up. That one died spectacularly though and my parents decided not to get it repaired but bought a Denon A/V receiver and a Denon DCD-15000 CD player to replace the Marantz when it blew up instead of getting it repaired. I don't remember why they opted not to repair it. Anyways, the CD player sounded quite good but that Denon receiver was awful. The pre/power amplifier were mediocre. So was the tuner. The phono stage was awful. Between getting the CD player at the same time and the truly awful sounding phono preamp in that Denon receiver, my family pretty much stopped playing our record collection overnight.
The Marantz was the much better receiver by far. The Denon was unforgivably dull and sucked the life out of every piece of music that was passed through it for some reason. If anything it was the opposite of every Sony stereo system that I encountered from the same time period which sounded so much better even though they had that goosed up overdone sound. MSG, that was a good way of putting it. Anyhow, the Denon receiver and CD player went in the garbage when my parents sold the house and moved into a condo. I would've been curious to put the Denon on the bench and take some measurements on that too, just to see if I could identify why and how, what part of it's overall transfer function was responsible for sucking the life out and completely killing all the music played through this thing. Unfortunately, my parents threw it out along with the DCD-1500 and didn't tell me until after they were gone so the idea of doing that and then using it in a sound system for the back yard here went out the window.
Actually, speaking of the Sony TV at my place, my parents threw out a beautiful, low hours Panasonic plasma TV a couple of weeks ago. They decided to de-clutter one of the rooms in their condo and listed the TV on the condo building's internal buy and sell website but got no takers so they got the building maintenance people to carry it out of their condo and heave it into the bin and that was the end of that. If I had known they were going to throw out that low hours Panasonic plasma, I would've happily taken it and kicked the Sony with the crappy backlight bleedthrough out of my living room and put it downstairs in the workshop. What a waste of a beautiful plasma TV. But, as usual with my parents, they made a point of telling me after it was already gone, just like they've done with a lot of things including my grandparents car when they gave up driving when I was in college and was taking public transportation two hours each way, tell me about the car becoming available after it had already been sold.
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