A warning about the Marantz M-CR610

vimes

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Dec 28, 2014
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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.
 

Frank Harvey

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Jun 27, 2008
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We've had none of these issues with our demo model, which connects to our NAS drives and AVA RipnPlay without any issues. AirPlay always works fine, as does internet radio. I don't believe these types of systems are designed to be used by multiple people at the same time as it's not a multi-room product, so more than one user trying to control it via separate apps will more than likely confuse things. I can't say I've experienced the app crashing all the time, but then, we don't use it all the time, only during demonstrations. I wouldn't like to guess how many of these we have sold in store and online, but it'll be a lot, and if this was a genuine issue, we'd be seeing a lot coming back to us, which we don't.

How good is your network? Have you been in touch with Marantz technical to take you through any possible issues with your setup and network settings?
 

vimes

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Dec 28, 2014
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Hello! I might be extra upset since my home built system I personally use is so much faster and stable, but it requires a high degree of nerd to use. Also my neighbour who runs Sonos invites me over from time to time and I'm impressed with the app .

The Marantz is connected via LAN (Wire) to the router (RT-AC66U) connected by wire to a Zyxel NSA325V2 running a WD Red 3TB NAS formated as fat32 (tried with NTFS too). As for two people using the app both my parrents wanted to browser the media server er library, looking and agreeing tpo what to play, they couldn't. The system is only connected to one set of speakers. It might be just my unit if you say you don't get many complaints, the shop is still closed for christmas. As I said the online radio might be a Norway problem.

Luckily AirPlay works nicly, but the main reason I chose it was to use both airplay and the mediaserver, the mediaserver fail, the app too. Oh and the auto-update media library, does your shop version auto-update it, or do you have an update button?
 

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