For his 40 years ruby anniversary at Marantz, Ken Ishiwata and his daring team crafted these two audiophile gemstones with hand-selected and custom-made components to carry all the emotions of music. The KI Ruby Series is precision-made and virtuously tuned to deliver the most enjoyable sound to amplify your senses.
• Collector‘s item
• Individually numbered
• Limited to 1.000 sets
Few hi-fi companies, if any, can say that one person has steered their sound for four decades – like Ken Ishiwata does at Marantz. The KI Ruby SACD player and amplifier go beyond even the standards of past KI Signature achievements, embodying all of Ken Ishiwata’s experience and expertise. Therefor they carry Ken Ishiwata’s signature as integral part of their design.
Ken Ishiwata has been at the heart of Marantz for 40 years, but his influence extends beyond the many wonderful products he has developed for the company in that time.
He has a unique ability to conceptualise stunning sound reproduction, design the equipment required to achieve it, and then deliver enthralling demonstrations around the world leaving listeners spellbound with the new insights Marantz products can deliver into even the most familiar music.
In exploring every aspect of every design, just occasionally he finds a product with extra potential, which he can then take beyond the Marantz standard and into something even more special. A KI Signature product is born.
The knowledge of how to make a fine-sounding product truly magical has grown with each new KI Signature launch – by improving sound-critical components through a process of careful selection and subtle blending, testing, listening and testing again.
Few hi-fi companies, if any, can say that one person has steered their sound for four decades – like Ken Ishiwata does at Marantz. The KI Ruby SACD player and amplifier go beyond even the standards of past KI Signature achievements, embodying all of Ken Ishiwata’s experience and expertise. Therefor they carry Ken Ishiwata’s signature as integral part of their design.
Ken Ishiwata has been at the heart of Marantz for 40 years, but his influence extends beyond the many wonderful products he has developed for the company in that time.
He has a unique ability to conceptualise stunning sound reproduction, design the equipment required to achieve it, and then deliver enthralling demonstrations around the world leaving listeners spellbound with the new insights Marantz products can deliver into even the most familiar music.
In exploring every aspect of every design, just occasionally he finds a product with extra potential, which he can then take beyond the Marantz standard and into something even more special. A KI Signature product is born.
The knowledge of how to make a fine-sounding product truly magical has grown with each new KI Signature launch – by improving sound-critical components through a process of careful selection and subtle blending, testing, listening and testing again.
The PM-KI Ruby is built with just one aim – audio performance – which is why it uses a fully discrete two-stage design with separate power supplies for the preamplifier and power amp section to reduce interference, and draws on the design of the flagship PM-10 amplifier with its moving coil/moving magnet phono stage and Marantz HDAM technology throughout for signal purity.
It’s all built on a vibration-resistant double layer chassis for rigidity, with 5mm thick aluminum top lid, solid aluminum front, copper plated chassis and massive insulators.
It is equipped with high-quality nickel-plated input terminals and high-purity copper speaker connections.
The PM-KI Ruby features a current feedback design with newly-developed wide-range circuitry and a toroidal transformer dedicated to preamp for clarity and powerful sound.
The HDAM® SA3 circuitry offers the cleanest signal path and optimal dynamics through the amplifier, which delivers 100W per channel into 8ohm speakers, or 200Wpc into 4ohm. The audio signal path is made entirely from discrete components for optimal quality, with the RIAA equalization split into passive and active components: RIAA correction is carried out by a Marantz HDAM, while the all-discrete amplification runs in minimum-distortion Class A.
This is designed to deliver optimal sound quality by simplifying the signal path, the Marantz Musical Premium Phono EQ stage in the PM-KI amplifier can be used with both moving magnet and low-output moving coil cartridges, thanks to a built-in MC head amplifier.
And the design is all about lowering distortion by using two-stage amplification, combining Marantz HDAMs with JFETs (junction gate field effect transistors) in the input stage, giving high input impedance. This allows the no-negative-feedback design to be further simplified by the deletion of coupling capacitors – all then shielded – again reducing distortion and enhancing signal purity.
Marantz has been designing and making amplifiers for more than 65 years, and for 40 of those the products have reflected expertise of Ken Ishiwata.
Now, to mark his four decades with the company, the PM-KI Ruby amplifier has been developed and tuned by a highly experienced engineering team led by KI himself. And it arrives bearing Ken Ishiwata’s signature and a special Ruby motif.
The SA-KI Ruby carries the DNA of exceptional ancestors, designed to take the CD performance of Marantz models to the ultimate level. Now there’s a new classic. The SA-KI Ruby delivers the kind of sound able to bring you closer than ever to your favourite music.
The SA-KI Ruby features a new disc mechanism, developed by Marantz engineers, purely for audio: the SACD-M3. It is able to play SACDs, CDs, and compilations on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM.
The SA’s sophisticated yet clean design holds a generous power supply using a toroidal transformer, isolated digital inputs, and a high-quality analogue output stage with Marantz HDAMs
The SA-KI Ruby also has an asynchronous USB input, able to handle formats all the way up to PCM / DXD 384Hz/32bit and DSD11.2MHz, and handles all digital music with a unique Marantz Musical Mastering technology.
The SA-KI Ruby uses the unique Marantz Musical Mastering technology: all digital files are upconverted to a single-bit datastream using the proprietary MMM-Stream converter within the player, and then the high-frequency signal produced is processed by the unique MMM-Conversion stage, used in place of a conventional DAC, to produce the analogue output.
Marantz has been designing and making superior CD players for more than 35 years. Many of these products reflect the expertise of Ken Ishiwata.
Now, to mark his four decades with the company, the SA-KI Ruby CD player has been developed and tuned by a highly experienced engineering team led by KI himself. And it arrives bearing Ken Ishiwata’s signature and a special Ruby motif.
