p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; }
Hello, my parents wanted a new hifi-system and asked me for help. they wanted it to be 'wireless' and my thoughts went to Sonos, but after reading up and especially after reading a review here at What HiFi I opted for a Marantz M-CR610 with a pair of q acoustic concept 20's. The sound is great! Now for the bad parts...
As it is marketed as a 'wireless' system I expected it to perform well when controlling with the phone, I also expected it to be able to interact well with a NAS I set up (not my first NAS btw..) and be able to play from a portable hard drive I brought.
Tried three portable hard drives, all fat32, one of them sort of worked, the two others didn't. The manual says the drives must be fat32 or fat16.
The internet radio might be good for the UK or the US, where I live in Norway it is horrible, I'd say well over half the channels don't work and most of the channels that don't work cause the app for ipad or android to completely crash when starting, then the receiver tries for about 10-15 seconds to play the station to no luck. Some of the radio channels I found have not been in operation for over ten years. Marantz uses vTuner but should still quality controls the stations.
Now over to the app, oh my god the app. Now I feel very strongly about apps as I study information technology and make apps at school often. Forget about stability, it will crash , allot. (tested both on iOS and Android) . The one thing I think the app does well is changing input sources.
The app comes with an in-app spotify, it has trouble finding albums if you search for the album name, is slow and just down right annoying. but you can use AirPlay (also on Android if you're a bit nifty) to stream from the normal spotify app. CD player is slow but OK.
Now over to the annoying part, I digitalized my parents music collection, it took a lon time and it's well over 300 CDs, all stored in flac format ripped with EAC (This is legal in Norway) but if I want to browse the music server from the marantz app it will turn off all other audio sources and start playing from the music server. So it plays nothing until I press play, you cannot browse your music server from the app and still listen to TV. Now I can use a different browsing app, my parents can not. When I got the music server up and running it scanned it, took about an hour / an hour and a half, then it was slow but OK. Trouble came when my mom found two more CDs, I thought 'I'll just rip them, add them to the server and the reciver will find them'
It will not, it is impossible to manually refresh it, and I left the album in the server fo two days waiting for it to auto refresh, it never did. I had to turn my media server off, try to connect with the marantz, it failed, turn on my media server and re-index everything again.
Back to the app, if two people have the app open at the same time (even without any one of them doing anything) you're fresh out of luck, the reciver will have no idea what to do and stop whatever it's doing.
So long story short. If you want a receiver that handles the occasional AirPlay reasonably well, and want to use it for CDs and watching the telly get the Marantz M-CR610. If you want to use a media server, might have more then one user in the app at the same time, want an app that doesn't crash all the time for the love of god stay away from the M-CR610.
Note: Yes I have the latest firmware, Marantz might update the reviver to become better after this post. Check Google Play and iTunes reviews before buying one. The sound quality is great, unless you want very high volumes or get speakers it can't drive.
Hello, my parents wanted a new hifi-system and asked me for help. they wanted it to be 'wireless' and my thoughts went to Sonos, but after reading up and especially after reading a review here at What HiFi I opted for a Marantz M-CR610 with a pair of q acoustic concept 20's. The sound is great! Now for the bad parts...
As it is marketed as a 'wireless' system I expected it to perform well when controlling with the phone, I also expected it to be able to interact well with a NAS I set up (not my first NAS btw..) and be able to play from a portable hard drive I brought.
Tried three portable hard drives, all fat32, one of them sort of worked, the two others didn't. The manual says the drives must be fat32 or fat16.
The internet radio might be good for the UK or the US, where I live in Norway it is horrible, I'd say well over half the channels don't work and most of the channels that don't work cause the app for ipad or android to completely crash when starting, then the receiver tries for about 10-15 seconds to play the station to no luck. Some of the radio channels I found have not been in operation for over ten years. Marantz uses vTuner but should still quality controls the stations.
Now over to the app, oh my god the app. Now I feel very strongly about apps as I study information technology and make apps at school often. Forget about stability, it will crash , allot. (tested both on iOS and Android) . The one thing I think the app does well is changing input sources.
The app comes with an in-app spotify, it has trouble finding albums if you search for the album name, is slow and just down right annoying. but you can use AirPlay (also on Android if you're a bit nifty) to stream from the normal spotify app. CD player is slow but OK.
Now over to the annoying part, I digitalized my parents music collection, it took a lon time and it's well over 300 CDs, all stored in flac format ripped with EAC (This is legal in Norway) but if I want to browse the music server from the marantz app it will turn off all other audio sources and start playing from the music server. So it plays nothing until I press play, you cannot browse your music server from the app and still listen to TV. Now I can use a different browsing app, my parents can not. When I got the music server up and running it scanned it, took about an hour / an hour and a half, then it was slow but OK. Trouble came when my mom found two more CDs, I thought 'I'll just rip them, add them to the server and the reciver will find them'
It will not, it is impossible to manually refresh it, and I left the album in the server fo two days waiting for it to auto refresh, it never did. I had to turn my media server off, try to connect with the marantz, it failed, turn on my media server and re-index everything again.
Back to the app, if two people have the app open at the same time (even without any one of them doing anything) you're fresh out of luck, the reciver will have no idea what to do and stop whatever it's doing.
So long story short. If you want a receiver that handles the occasional AirPlay reasonably well, and want to use it for CDs and watching the telly get the Marantz M-CR610. If you want to use a media server, might have more then one user in the app at the same time, want an app that doesn't crash all the time for the love of god stay away from the M-CR610.
Note: Yes I have the latest firmware, Marantz might update the reviver to become better after this post. Check Google Play and iTunes reviews before buying one. The sound quality is great, unless you want very high volumes or get speakers it can't drive.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram