Marantz Project T-1

Contemplating the Project T-1 power amplifiers from Marantz, I realise that nothing in hi-fi should surprise us any more. If, in 1990, someone had told you that, by 1997, the hi-fi community would be clamouring for single-ended triodes and horn systems, that Quad and McIntosh and Marantz would reissue their valve classics, that Mobile Fidelity would open a new LP pressing plant and that Krell and Audio Research would introduce integrated amps, you’d have had that someone committed.

Yet all of this has come to pass. So I’m not surprised that one of the greatest amplifiers on earth comes from a division of Philips, a mass-market-oriented, Japanese/Dutch corporation, big enough to have purchased Argentina just with what it must have lost from DCC.

But that division happens to be Marantz. If there’s a single Japanese manufacturer capable of taking on the extreme high-end, it could only be Marantz. a surprise is the amp’s performance.