Marantz DV7000 (1999)

The Marantz DV7000 was a DVD player released in 1999 at ¥85,000. It sat in Marantz's C-series line, but the company's audio engineering went into it throughout. The pitch was simple: a DVD deck built with the same care Marantz put into its CD players, not a budget video component with a logo slapped on.

On the video side, it used a 10-bit/27MHz D/A converter and a wideband, high-slew-rate video amplifier, with discrete analog filtering on the component, S-video, and composite outputs. The audio section got most of the attention. A 24-bit/96kHz D/A converter fed the company's proprietary HDAM modules. The circuit board was laid out symmetrically, and the digital switching supply and audio linear regulator were housed separately to keep noise out of the signal path. The front panel was scratch hairline finish aluminum - a small touch that marked it as a Marantz rather than a generic OEM deck.

Features were generous for the period. The DV7000 played DVD, Video CD, CD-DA, and CD-R. It output Dolby Digital and DTS digitally, and it had a Virtual Dolby Digital mode for two-speaker setups. A digital filter switching function let you choose between sharp and soft roll-off for audio. There was also a picture control with adjustments for sharpness, brightness, color, and contrast, plus 2x and 4x zoom. The machine also carried something called "Specializer N-2-2," described as a 3D acoustic technology. The source record garbles the developer's name, so the exact origin of that feature is unclear. An auto power-off function put the deck into standby after roughly 30 minutes of sitting stopped with the screen saver running.

Specifications as recorded: signal-to-noise ratio of 110dB (EIAJ), dynamic range of 100dB (EIAJ), total harmonic distortion of 0.0025% (EIAJ), and horizontal resolution of 500 lines or more. Frequency response ran 4Hz - 22kHz for DVD at 48kHz sampling, extending to 44kHz at 96kHz sampling. The unit measured 440 × 87 × 304mm, weighed 4.2kg, and drew 22W. Outputs were extensive: two composite video, one S-video, one component (Y, Cb, Cr), optical and coaxial digital audio, two analog stereo pairs, a headphone jack, and remote control in/out. All were gold-plated except the S-video and remote control terminals.

No independent professional reviews of the DV7000 have surfaced, and the model doesn't appear in the usual Marantz brand indexes, so cross-referencing its place in the lineup is difficult. The technical record above comes from a single spec database. If you own one or have period literature, the archive would welcome the details.