28 Australian

ON TEST

despite having the field largely to itself, the company is not resting on its laurels, but is still continually improving the performance of its machines and adding features, whilst at the same time maintaining features that you’ll rarely find on any other CD players, irrespective of their price, and the Marantz CD6005 is a perfect example of this.

Let’s look at disc-handling first, because the Marantz CD6005 not only plays CDs, CD-Rs and CD-RW discs, but will also play discs you have created on your computer by burning MP3 and WMA files.

It does this with a new tray-loading transport (eschewing the slot-loaders that are becoming more popular, possibly because Marantz makes its own transports, whereas

If you have not upgraded your CD player for a few years, you’re missing out on better sound from all the CDs you already own, not to mention missing

out on operational features you may not have known were available! Plus, if you buy new discs, you’ll find that having them contain CD-Text as a bonus is now the rule, rather than the exception. Best of all, as you’ll dis-cover when you read on, you can get all this without breaking the bank.

The equipmenTMarantz was one of the first manufacturers to build a CD player and is now one of the few left that’s still making them. What impresses me the most about the company is that

most other manufacturers source their slot-loading transports from Teac).

I couldn’t see any visible differences from the trays I’ve seen on previous CD players from Marantz, so I had to make a telephone call to Qualifi, the Australian distributor, to find out what was new and it turns out that both the disc drive motor and the tray drive motor have been improved, along with various linkage mechanisms. When I got around to using the tray, it appears the new motors and linkages have certainly improved performance slightly, with the new tray’s open/close operations being a little quicker than I had timed the old ones at and, although I don’t keep records of the ‘noisiness’ of tray motors or drive motors

cd player

Marantz CD6005

29avhub.com.au

Marantz cd6005 cd player ON TEST

(PCBs). Although Marantz’s HDAMs perform exactly the same electronic function as ordinary mass-produced op-amps, Marantz says its customised HDAMs have faster slew rates and much lower noise levels than conventional IC op-amps, to deliver improved audio performance.

The front-panel is almost the same as all other Marantz CD (and SACD) players, which is great because it means there are sufficient front-panel controls to allow you to use the CD6005 without any need to reach for the remote control. So you’ll find ‘Stop’, ‘Play/Pause’, Track Skip Forward/Reverse and Fast-Forward/Fast Reverse are all there, either side of the disc tray drawer. All advanced features are accessed with the remote.

Marantz now provides its Owners’ Manuals as interactive files on CD-ROM. You can print them out if you want, but the interactive pdf format used is simply fabulous, as everything is hyper-linked, so if, on the contents ‘page’ you click on anything you want to know more about, such as ‘Playing an iPod’, the hyperlink will take you directly to that page in the manual. There are also tabs at the top and bottom of each page that take you directly to the Contents page, or to the Index page… or wherever you want to go. Using the pdf manual is actually faster and more convenient than using a printed manual.

in use and performanceThe Marantz CD6005 features one of my all-time favourite operational features, and one that’s super-rare to find on any CD player these days: a pitch control! This is exactly what its name suggests it is: a control that allows you to adjust the pitch of any CD you’re playing. What earthly use is this? If you’re a musician, you’d already know that such a control will allow you to make adjust the pitch of the CD you’re playing so that it’s exactly ‘in tune’ with the instrument you’re using to play along with the CD. Although it’s possible to re-tune stringed instruments (and most woodwinds and brass) to the cor-rect pitch to play along with a CD, it’s obviously impossible to do with a piano (well, not impossible, but cer-tainly impractical), it’s inconvenient,

Marantz CD6005 CD Player

Brand: MarantzModel: CD6005Category: CD PlayerrrP: $960Warranty: Three yearsDistributor: Qualifi Pty ltdaddress: 24 lionel road Mt Waverley VIC 3149

1800 242 426 (03) 8542 1111 info@qualifi.com.au www.qualifi.com.au

readers interested in a full technical appraisal of the performance of the Marantz CD6005 CD Player should continue on and read the laBOraTOry rePOrT published on page 34. readers should note that the results mentioned in the report, tabulated in performance charts and/or displayed using graphs

and/or photographs should be construed as applying only to the specific sample tested.

Lab Report on page 34

• Marvellous sound• Feature-packed• Fit’ n finish

• Digital input• rear-panel USB• Dim-ish display

laB rePOrT

(except to mention in reviews if they happen to be intrusively noisy) it seemed to me that this new tray-loader was a little quieter in operation than usual.

The USB input on the front panel handles MP3, WMA, AAC, and WAV files and has sufficient current delivery to charge an iPad, even if you’ve switched the CD6005 to standby, or if it switches itself to standby, which it will do by itself automatically if you haven’t used it for a while. (The auto-standby mode is switchable, so you can disable it if you don’t want the player to switch to standby mode. When it is in standby mode, it will draw less than half a watt from your mains power supply (so long as it’s not charging an iDevice).

The CD6005 uses a Cirrus Logic CS4398, which is a 24-bit/192kHz stereo DAC that uses oversampled multibit Delta-Sigma architecture, but with a shaping technology that eliminates distortion due to capacitor mismatching. (This excellent DAC has also been ‘trickled down’ to the lower-priced CD5005, presumably so Marantz—now part of D&M Holdings, which also owns Denon—can buy these DACs from Cirrus Logic in much larger quantities, and thus benefit from lower unit pricing.)

Marantz makes much in its promotional literature of its use of what it calls ‘HDAMs’ and now offers them in a variety of performance grades. HDAM stands for Hyper Dynamic Amplifier Module and is a type of operational amplifier (a.k.a. ‘op-amp’). An operational amplifier is a voltage amplifier with a differential input and a single-ended output that produces an output hundreds of thousands of times larger than the potential difference between its input terminals. All CD player manufacturers use op-amps (they’re one of the most-used devices in electronics!) but most of them use standard ‘off-the-shelf’ op-amps, packaged as integrated circuits, which cost only a few cents each.

Marantz’s HDAM is an op-amp that is built using proper circuit boards populated with discrete surface-mount components, with short mirror image left/right signal paths, which are then packaged before being inserted into the main printed circuit boards

because every CD you play will very likely be very slightly ‘out of tune’. It will be so be-cause many bands tune their instruments so they’re in tune with each other, but not nec-essarily at what’s called ‘concert pitch’ where the frequency of the note ‘A’ above middle C is exactly 440Hz. In other cases, you may find a recording engineer has adjusted the speed of a performance to fit a particular time (very common back in the days of the LP), which also has an effect on pitch (by raising or lowering it). If you’re not a musi-cian, you won’t know that musicians often ‘play along’ with CDs to learn musical pieces.

The Marantz CD6005 features one of my all-time favourite operational features, and one that’s super-rare to find on any CD player these days: a pitch control!

32 Australian

ON TEST Marantz cd6005 cd player

in 2004, so it was inevitable it’d get multiple spins on the CD6005 during the lengthy reviewing process and, yes, once again, I was captivated by the sound. Lang’s voice is reproduced accurately, along with that of the various instruments, and the emotion of the music is delivered perfectly… raw, plaintive, and heart-wrenching. For those unfortunate enough not to have heard it, Lang sings songs by Canadian songwriters (Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Jane Siberry et al) and some versions are definitive. (The album’s title stems from the fact that the border between Canada and the USA mostly tracks the 49th Parallel).

To test piano sound, it was back to another life-long personally favourite, Glenn Gould and his second (1982) version of the Goldberg Variations, preferred over the 1955 version due to its better recording quality and my preference for the slower tempi (with exceptions for some of the variations). Again, I heard only fantastic sound quality from the Marantz CD6005 with the piano tone (unique!) reproduced beautifully, and Gould’s trademark humming pitched and placed in the soundfield exactly where it should be. I experimented with the various display on/off and digital on/off combinations, using the first section of the Aria and the Marantz’s A–B repeat function, but although I fancied I heard infinitesimal differences between them, I certainly could not pick a ‘best’ from amongst them, so all things being equal, I’d prefer to leave the display on… but perhaps dimmed a little.

conclusionThe performance of the Marantz CD6005 is nothing short of miraculous. It’s an amazingly good CD player at a frankly unbelievably low price that’s just packed—overloaded even!—with features you will not find even in far higher-priced CD players.  greg borrowman

There’s even a CD label called ‘Music Minus One’ which sells CDs of music on which one instrument is missing, so that when you play along, you’re the one providing the ‘missing’ music. (These days, they also sell downloads and MIDI files as well. You can find the outfit here: www.musicminusone.com)

Equally important for musicians is an A–B repeat function, so they can select a single musical phrase from within a song (track) and play it over and over, and this feature is also fitted to the Marantz CD6005. This, too, is a great learning tool for musicians. For ‘whole performance’ practise, the CD6005 lets you repeat a track or a whole disc (or a subset of the tracks on a disc, which you do by using the programming section). Speaking of programming, the CD6005 has a very unusual—and very useful!—version of programming, where rather than ‘adding’ tracks from a CD to your ‘playlist’, you can instead ‘delete’ the tracks you don’t want to play. The advantage of this is that because it’s likely that any CD you’ve decided to spend money on will have more tracks on it that you like than it will have tracks you don’t like, it’s much faster to tell the player the one or two tracks you don’t want to play than tell it all the tracks you don’t want it to play. (You’re not really ‘deleting’ the tracks, of course… just getting the player to skip them in the programming menu.) And if you prefer the ‘normal’ method of track programming, the good news is that the Marantz CD6005 offers that version of programming as well!

Once a disc starts playing, you have a few options to improve sound quality. First, you can elect to have the two-line front panel display switched on or off. Switching it off will prolong the life of the display and potentially improve sound quality. Second, you additionally have the option of switching the player’s digital output on or off. (If you’re not actually using the digital output, it would be better to turn it off.) All these functions

are controlled using the ‘Audio EX’ function. You can also dim the display if you like. As for the reason for there being a two-line display, the CD6005 is capable of displaying CD-Text, so if this is contained on the CD you’re playing, it will show the name of the disc being played and/or the name of the track that’s playing in the front-panel display along with all the usual information about track number, elapsed time and so on.

Operationally, the Marantz CD6005 is a marvel. Other than a fairly slow disc initialisation (11 seconds) all other transport modes are blindingly fast (three seconds for a 99 track skip, for example), and the remote control offers direct track selection (press 2, then 3, to start playing track 23) rather than the usual awkward ‘press two tens plus three’ system to achieve the same end. You can skip tracks whilst maintaining the player in pause mode (a boon for radio stations and theatres), and you also can’t start play from pause by pressing pause again… yet another ‘safety’ feature that will appeal to those who know what I’m talking about.

Whichever of the play options you choose, you’ll be gobsmacked by the sound quality you hear, because playing back CDs from my collection I was continually amazed not only by the high quality of the sound, but also because it was issuing from a full-featured machine built by one of the world’s most famous manufacturers, that has a recommended retail price of less than a grand. I am still in love with k. d. lang’s album ‘Hymns of the 49th Parallel’ despite having played it almost daily since its release

The performance of the Marantz CD6005 is nothing short of miraculous!

laB repOrT ON paGe 34

34 Australian

LAB REPORT Marantz cd6005 cd playercONTINUed FrOM paGe 32

Marantz CD6005 CD Player — Laboratory test resultsanalogue Section result Units/Comment

Output Voltage 2.2320 / 2.2427 volts (left Ch/ right Ch)

Frequency response See Graph dB (20Hz – 20kHz)

Channel Separation 124 / 109 / 84 dB at 16Hz / 1kHz / 20kHz

THD+N 0.0168% @ 1kHz @ 0dBFS

Channel Balance 0.0415dB @ 1kHz @ 0dBFS

Channel Phase 0.03 / 0.02 / 0.09 degrees at 16Hz / 1kHz / 20kHz

Group Delay +180 / –5.34 degrees (1–20kHz / 20–1kHz)

Signal-to-Noise ratio (No Pre-emph) 106 / 113 dB (unweighted/weighted)

De-emphasis error 0.001 / 0.008 /0.148 at 1kHz / 4kHz / 16kHz

linearity error @ –60.00dB / –70.00dB 0.02 / 0.05 dB (Test Signal Not Dithered)

linearity error @ –80.59dB / –85.24dB 0.02 / 0.02 dB (Test Signal Not Dithered)

linearity error @ –89.46dB / –91.24dB 0.04 / 0.04 dB (Test Signal Not Dithered)

linearity error @ –80.70dB / –90.31dB 0.04 / 0.06 dB (Test Signal Dithered)

Power Consumption 0.31 / 13.58 watts (Standby / On)

Mains Voltage During Testing 240 – 252 volts (Minimum – Maximum)

Digital Section result Units/Comment

Digital Carrier amplitude 63.54mV audioband

Digital Carrier amplitude 830mV / 547mV Differential / Common Mode

audioband Jitter 0.9 / 0.005 nS (p–p) / UI (p–p)

Data Jitter 0.9 / 0.005 nS (p–p) / UI (p–p)

Deviation 4.4 ppm

Frame rate 44100.195

eye-Narrowing (Zero Cross) 0.00 / 0.00 nS (p–p) / UI (p–p)

eye-Narrowing (200mV) 7.1 / 0.04 nS (p–p) / UI (p–p)

absolute Phase Normal Normal / Inverted

Bit activity at Digital O/P 16 Where Fitted

laboraTory TesT reporTAs with most CD players, the voltage at the line output terminals of the CD6005 is suffi-ciently high to drive any integrated amplifier or AV receiver as well as almost all power amplifiers. Newport Test Labs measured that voltage at just over 2.2 volts RMS. The volt-ages for the left and right channels were al-most identical, resulting in a channel balance outcome of 0.0415dB, which is exceptionally good. Separation between channels was also outstanding, exceeding 100dB at almost all audio frequencies, but diminishing to 84dB at 20kHz. Channel phase was excellent, averaging around 0.02–0.03° across most of the audio band and increasing to just 0.09° at 20kHz… all errors so small they’d be totally undetectable by the human ear. Group delay came in at 180° in one direction and 5.34° in the other.

Linearity error (a measurement of whether a CD player produces an exact level when replaying a signal of that level… in other words whether the player produces a signal at exactly –60dB when replaying a CD with a signal recorded at –60dB) was outstanding. As you can see, they were tiny, varying by 0.02dB to 0.06dB. So, for example, when reproducing a signal supposed to be replayed at –80.70dB referenced to rated output (2.2320 volts in this case) the Marantz played the signal back at –80.74dB, accounting for the 0.04dB error noted in the tabulated figures.

This is actually a phenomenally good result. If you were to look at voltages, rather than dB ratios, this means that instead of delivering a voltage of 0.00008941 volts, the Marantz delivered 0.000089 volts, or a difference of 0.00000041 volts.

Distortion was exceedingly low, even for a CD player, which is amply demonstrated in Graph 1, which shows THD for a 1kHz signal recorded at –20dB. You can see that the noise floor is sitting down at –140dB and above it is a single third-harmonic distortion component (HDL3) at a level of –121dB, or 0.0000891%. Wow! When the level of the test signal is reduced to –60dB (Graph 2) we can see a series of odd harmonics, all at around –120dB caused by converter errors due to the lack of dithering. This is also the case in Graph 3, though in this case the odd harmonic components have risen above –120dB out to the 13th, but all of them are still more than 100dB down (0.001%). Once dither is added (Graph 4), the distortion disappears, but the noise floor has risen, but since it rises to only –140dB, this isn’t an issue—technically or audibly. And in practise, since all commercially-recorded CDs are effectively ‘dithered’, what you see in Graph 4 is what you could expect to hear through your loudspeakers: no harmonically-related distortion whatsoever, even at signal levels as low as –90dB.

35avhub.com.au

Marantz cd6005 cd player LAB REPORT

The DAC in the CD6005 is excellent, with barely any unwanted sampling artefacts, as you can see in Graph 5 (a maximum level signal recorded at 20kHz) and Graph 6 (which shows CCIF IMD). In Graph 6 you can see the unwanted sidebands at 18kHz and 22kHz are more than 110dB down (0.0003%)

and the unwanted regenerated signal at 1kHz is nearly 120dB down. Again, outstanding performance.

As you might have guessed from the level of the noise floor shown in the spectrograms, the overall wideband signal-to-noise ratios measured by Newport Test Labs were very low,

20.56 Hz 100.00 1000.00 10000.00

-0.40

-0.20

0.00

0.20

0.40

dBFSNewport Test Labs

Graph 7. Frequency Response at @ 0dB recorded level. [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

0.00 Hz 9600.00 19200.00 28800.00 38400.00 48000.00

-140.00

-120.00

-100.00

-80.00

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00dBFS

Newport Test Labs

Graph 6. CCIF Distortion (Twin-Tone Intermodulation) @ 0dB using 19kHz and 20kHz test signals in 1:1 ratio. [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

0.00 Hz 4000.00 8000.00 12000.00 16000.00 20000.00

-140.00

-120.00

-100.00

-80.00

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00dBFS

Newport Test Labs

Graph 4. THD @ 1kHz @ –90.31dB recorded level. (With dither) [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

0.00 Hz 4000.00 8000.00 12000.00 16000.00 20000.00

-140.00

-120.00

-100.00

-80.00

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00dBFS

Newport Test Labs

Graph 2. THD @ 1kHz @ –60dB recorded level. [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

0.00 Hz 4000.00 8000.00 12000.00 16000.00 20000.00

-140.00

-120.00

-100.00

-80.00

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00dBFS

Newport Test Labs

Graph 3. THD @ 1kHz @ –91.24dB recorded level. (No dither) [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

0.00 Hz 9600.00 19200.00 28800.00 38400.00 48000.00

-140.00

-120.00

-100.00

-80.00

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00dBFS

Newport Test Labs

Graph 8. Impulse Train. (One maximum amplitude positive sample every 70 samples (630 pulses per second). [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

0.00 Hz 9600.00 19200.00 28800.00 38400.00 48000.00

-140.00

-120.00

-100.00

-80.00

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00dBFS

Newport Test Labs

Graph 5. THD @ 20kHz @ 0dB recorded level. [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

0.00 Hz 4000.00 8000.00 12000.00 16000.00 20000.00

-140.00

-120.00

-100.00

-80.00

-60.00

-40.00

-20.00

0.00dBFS

Newport Test Labs

Graph 1. THD @ 1kHz @ –20dB recorded level. [Marantz CD6005 CD Player]

with even the unweighted figure coming in at three figures (106dB) and the A-weighted result at 113dB. This effectively means your amplifier is going to add more noise to the audio signal than the Marantz CD6005.

The frequency response of the CD6005 was ruler flat up to 3kHz, after which it rose slightly to end up being 0.047dB high at 20kHz. In the bass, the response was just 0.02dB down at 8Hz. It’s worth noting that this increase at 20kHz is only visible because of the extreme vertical scaling of the graph, which has divisions of just 0.2dB, compared to the conventional vertical scaling that’s used, of 5dB per division. Since no-one could perceive such minuscule differences in level at these frequencies—even under ideal conditions—we can regard the response as totally flat.

Another version of the response (in essence) is shown in Graph 8: pretty-much perfect performance. The same may also be said of the tabulated results for the CD6005’s digital output, which are outstanding in every respect, though perhaps the result for zero-cross eye-narrowing is remarkable for being the second time any DAC has exhibited no eye-narrowing whatsoever (eye-narrowing being indicative of the total level of jitter in the signal).

Overall, outstanding measured performance across the board… indeed, state-of-the-art in every respect. Steve Holding

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