Marantz CD-75 (circa 1987)
The Marantz CD-75 was a mid-1980s CD player sold in Japan at ¥59,800. The period record on it is modest - no full review has surfaced in the Archive - but the technical documentation that exists gives a fairly complete picture of a machine from the Philips-owned era of Marantz.
Inside, the CD-75 used a 16-bit, 4× oversampling digital filter feeding left/right independent D/A converters. It kept the basic "Z-Filter" layout of a 4× oversampling digital filter and a third-order Bessel filter. Marantz fitted newly developed LSIs for the digital filter and PLL demodulation circuits, which folded the decoder into a three-chip set. The transport was the improved Philips CDM-2, with its sub-chassis and swing arm molded from high-density glass-wool plastic. The objective lens got a 10-micron aspherical coating through Philips' replica technology. The focusing mechanism moved from the conventional moving-magnet type to a moving-coil design for quicker tracking. The whole CDM-2 assembly floated, isolated from the chassis.
Features were generous for the period. You got a digital output, a multi-display showing total/elapsed/remaining time plus track and index numbers, a 20-song random-access programmer, skip play up to 99 tracks, index play, three-speed search, and repeat. A direct-play function closed the tray and started playback when you pressed play. A headphone jack with volume control was onboard, and the included RMC-75 remote had ten keys. Pair it with a Marantz Synchro/Rec-compatible cassette deck (the SD-565 or SD-74, for instance) and the CD-75's play button could trigger recording start on the deck.
Specifications as documented: frequency response 2 Hz-20 kHz ±0.3 dB, dynamic range 96 dB, signal-to-noise ratio 96 dB, channel separation 94 dB at 1 kHz (one source lists 90 dB), harmonic distortion 0.003% at 1 kHz, output 2 Vrms. Power consumption was 20 W. Dimensions were 420 × 86 × 304 mm and weight was 4 kg. The CD-75 appears in period listings under several variant names - CD-75 mkII, CD-75 SE Mk2, CD-75 II - and some sources date the base model to 1986 rather than 1987. The Archive has not been able to reconcile the variant tree definitively.
Owner reports, mostly from forums, mention the usual aging issues: lasers needing replacement and intermittent disc-reading failures. The CD-75 mkII has been identified in listings as using the TDA1541 DAC with a CDM-1 transport. The base model shown in a service video uses the TDA1541 and SAA7220 chips with a CDM-2/10 transport.
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