Fully-loaded AV

The second of our AV receivers this issue is rather different — firstly in that it’s not strictly a receiver, because it has no tuner section. But it has, er, quite a lot to compensate, this being a high-level multichannel amplifier absolutely loaded with smarts.

Equipment

We shall return to the tuner thing (because we think it’s interesting), but first let’s get into the core of the Marantz SR8015 multichannel amplifier. Because it’s the real deal. It comes equipped with 11 amplifier channels, each rated at up to 140W output into 8 ohms across the full audio bandwidth, at miniscule (0.05%) levels of total harmonic distortion, two channels driven. The amplifiers can be set to run optimally with 8, 6 or 4-ohm loads on all channels. We suppose that there exist some particularly exotic speakers somewhere in the world which may not work well with this receiver, but as we’ll see, it seemed very comfortable even with quite difficult loads.

The nominal reason for 11 channels is that it supports a set of speakers