The Marantz Again

My uncle just got through servicing this fantastic vintage receiver for me.





I got this from my friend Geoff, who lived across the street at the time. He was using it as an amp for his band, as I recall.

I used it myself for a long time, mostly for tuning in to Dr. Demento on WLUP out of Chicago, and listening to music.

When I first got it though, I'd only barely started listening to music outside of Classical. My first foray into more mainstream music (if you can call them mainstream) was They Might Be Giants. I well remember listening to Flood, the first CD I ever bought, on this unit, up in my front upstairs bedroom while I was in high school.

It came to show its age. It needed the speaker terminals replaced and its antenna was missing a screw. Most of the lamps behind the face plate were burned out, and the power button had never worked; it was held in by an old magic card booster wrapper.

When I got it back from my uncle, I was floored. It looks like it just came back from the factory. Today, I finally had a chance to connect everything up. Appropriately, I am listening to Flood as I take and edit these photos to show it off. *smiles*

This amp is only 20 watts per channel, so it's a lot quieter than the Sony unit I just curb-picked that does 110 watts per channel in Dolby 5.1. Yet I don't need to have ridiculous levels of loud. This more than does the job, and -maybe it's in my head- I feel like the Marantz just sounds *better* somehow.

Now, I need to remind myself that I don't have time, money, or space to get more into vintage hi-fi. I got rid of all my records for a reason, but the idea of listening to Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl again is kind of calling out to me....

Behind the cut, there's a picture of the 2220 ( in the dark )

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I should be going to bed. Instead, I'm rolling through the FM dial on the Marantz, now that I've got my little FM dipole antenna thumbtacked up the sloping ceiling above it.

After having played Somebody to Love on my computer earlier, the same song was just beginning on the station I was already randomly tuned to when I switched the selector knob over to FM. I'll see that as a good omen! I get signals basically all the way up and down; maybe I'll figure out what some of them are and see how far away I can pick things up. It's too bad that, as kishenehn was just talking about, there are many fewer individual and unique stations out there these days than there used to be. So many have been bought up by conglomerates.