Marantz PM-95 (1988–1991)
The PM-95 was Marantz's flagship integrated amplifier of the late 1980s. It was rare and very expensive, and it put a full digital section inside an analog amplifier chassis. Released in Japan in April 1988, it was built for the buyer who already had a CD-95DR or CD-99DR player, and it came ready for DAT and DAB as well. The internal structure closely followed the earlier PM-94 Limited, but the phono board location went to the digital section, which took the entire right side of the chassis. There is no phono input at all.
The digital heart is a pair of Philips TDA1541A-S1 converters, run in differential mode and feeding a 9th-order GIC low-pass filter. The "S1" is the crown-marked, hand-selected highest grade of the "A version." A digital direct switch could route the converter output straight to the master volume, bypassing everything but the attenuator. Digital inputs were two Toslink optical and five coaxial. Outputs were one optical and three coaxial. All digital circuitry shut off entirely when an analog source was selected, which kept digital noise out of the analog circuits.
The amplifier section had two operating modes: pure Class A at 30W + 30W into 8Ω, or Class AB at 120W + 120W into 8Ω. Dynamic power was rated up to 300W into 4Ω in AB mode (thevintageknob.org lists 460W at 4Ω). THD was rated at 0.008% from 20 Hz to 20 kHz into 8Ω, with a damping factor of 200. The output stage used a triple push-pull configuration with Power-MOS FETs, preceded by FET-plus-bipolar transistors in the pre-driver stage. A large toroidal transformer and low-ESR smoothing caps fed separate LDPS power supplies for each section. Thick LC-OFC internal wiring (1.53mm diameter) was used throughout. The volume control was a two-gang resistive-conductor plastic attenuator, operated by a knob machined from solid aluminum - one of the few knobs on the faceplate. Construction was heavy: a copper-plated diecast chassis, diecast aluminum side panels, a massive aluminum top plate, 70µm PCB traces, and 25 high-performance relays to keep signal paths short. The whole unit weighed 27.2 kg.
The separately sold RC-95PM remote (¥40,000) was a substantial metal-encased learning remote. It could store around 150 codes beyond its pre-programmed set for ten components, and it could name sources. It was shared with the Marantz CD-12 combo and the original Philips LHH1000.
*The Vintage Knob* described the PM-95's "AB" mode as retaining a bit of sliding bias rather than being a pure class-B design. It also noted the upgrade in smoothing caps (low-ESR, but two instead of the PM-94's four). The same source gives the amp's power figures somewhat differently in its narrative text than in its spec table. The detailed specifications above follow the more complete audio-database.com listing, which aligns with the spec table on thevintageknob.org for most figures.
Surviving documentation is thin. No period magazine reviews of the PM-95 have surfaced in the archive's sources, and there is no corroborating second source for much of the thevintageknob.org data. Current market activity is limited mostly to Russian listings asking in the 149,000-150,000 ruble range, and a couple of YouTube videos documenting recapping work. The PM-95's successor was the PM-90, which ran from 1991 to 1996.
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