Marantz NR1504 Slim Line 5.1 Channel Home Theater Network AV Receiver with AirPlay

I'm very happy with this receiver. Unlike my previous receiver which was also full of bells and whistles, this one really delivers. The internet radio and home-networking just work. My previous piece of equipment would constantly skip or drop a song or it would take forever to switch from one song to another. No problems with this one. The sound quality is great, but it does not go all that loud (not a problem if you live in apartment like me). Of course the small form factor is one of the more attractive features of this receiver.It also comes with Android and iPhone Apps so you can control the receiver from your phone. At first I thought that this would be a silly gimmick of a feature, but it isn't. No more searching for the remote! If you have your phone in your pocket, then you have your TV remote too! And it provides an easier interface to search for and play music than the receiver itself.One slightly annoying thing: I'm still using an older DVD player which uses the older RGB connections rather than HDMI. This receiver does not have the older connections, so we had to hook up the DVD player directly to the TV instead. If you get a newer DVD player, you shouldn't have this issue.

Great receiver - relatively easy to set up, low profile let me place it on a narrow shelf in a media cabinet, and it has all the features I wanted. The only reason I've given it 4 stars rather than 5 is that, like many other products nowadays, there's no full manual provided with the receiver, but rather a little "Getting Started" flyer (8 pages each in English, French and Spanish),which contains the basic setup information. The full manual (which runs 211 pages!) comes on a CD-ROM (or can be accessed from Marantz's website). Thus, if you want to figure out how all the bells and whistles work, you either have to print out the whole document, or have the manual loaded up on a nearby computer while you play with the receiver. How much more would it have cost Marantz (or other manufacturers) to include a copy of the full manual in the box (which cost would no doubt have been passed along to the consumer)? Maybe I'm a dinosaur (and yeah, I know that more paper means fewer trees), but I find it easier to work with a printed manual than one on a computer screen.

My Denon died. Logged on to Amazon, selected the Marantz because of prior experience with the brand, reviews, and my needs. Since my Denon was totally dead, I paid extra for 1-day shipping and Amazon, as usual, delivered as promised.The good.I have 5 devices that I use: 1 DVD, 1 Blu-Ray, 1 Roku, 1 DVR from Time-Warner, and 1 DVR from DirectTV...all HDMI and allof which worked perfectly with my Denon (although on the Denon I had to use a splitter to hook-up the DVD and Roku for a single HDMI). I hooked up the speakers to the Marantz...straightforward. Since the Marantz has 5 HDMI inputs on the back, I could, and did, put my Roku and my DVD on separate inputs. So I lugged in my HDMI devices and sat and watched a beautiful picture from DirectTV. Everything worked beautifully. Excellent sound. Excellent picture. My wife even commented that she thought the picture quality was ever so slightly better than the Denon's, and I agreed.The bad.Nothing else worked. When selected, the other four inputs on the back showed a fraction of a picture once every 5 secondsor so, and choppy, unintelligble sound. I tried hooking the Time-Warner DVR to the same HDMI input (#1) that I had successwith for the DirectTv DVR, and it wouldn't work there, either. I did the same for each of my units. It appears that the Marantz box that I got only works with DirectTV.The really bad.Not convinced that it wasn't some setting I was missing, I combed through the Quick Set-up and Users Manual which came onthe DVD which accompanied the unit. It's not the worst manual I've ever seen, but it seems to be written only for people who already know the answer to each question. The use of terms that I'm not familiar with - sort of like inside jokes - makes many sentences totally meaningless, unless you know already what it is you're trying to find out. The closest I found was "Video signals are not output if the input video signals do not match the display’s resolution", but my two DVR's are set identically and the TV resolution didn't change, so that didn't explain it.Worse.The one thing the Getting Started manual did tell me was that contacting Marantz is only possible Monday through Friday, 9 to 8 EST. I received the box on Friday and they were already closed when I tried to call. My wife and I decided that DirectTV provided enough entertainment for the weekend and settled in to use it in the one way it did work. That lasted a little over an hour. After that, the picture turned to faint pastel blues and pinks. The sound was still good, but the picture was useless.The last straw.It's now Monday morning, and when I called I got a message telling me that they wouldn't be open until 1:30 PM. It was at that point that I logged on to Amazon and requested a return. That was the best part of the entire purchase. Thanks Amazon.Now I know that every manufacturer sometimes ships a lemon. The problem is that when you're the one who gets it, it doesn't feel good. That's where a great manual and/or caring customer service experience can quite often save the day. But when you have a bad unit, lousy manual, and non-existent service, it tends to make you think, as I have, that I won't be buying any more Marantz products.