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 January 1, 2005 Memories of Marantz I was recently rummaging through some files and came across a review I’d written in 1975 of a four-channel receiver from Marantz. At the time, I expected flak from some audiophiles -- there had always been certain names to conjure with in audio, and from as early as I could remember, Marantz had been one of them. The company, founded in 1952 by Saul Marantz, became renowned for producing some of the most innovative audio products of the 1950s and ’60s. When audiophiles gathered to discuss the ultimate in sound equipment, the Marantz name always came up.Aficionados remember Saul Marantz’s landmark amplifiers and tuners, but few remember that Marantz was the first company to market a receiver -- a tuner, preamplifier, and power amplifier on a single chassis. Those same aficionados felt somewhat betrayed in the mid-’60s, when Marantz sold his company to Superscope and moved on to found Dahlquist speakers. As I said in that 1975 review, "A lot of people expected that, when they purchased the highly prestigious Marantz company some years ago, [Superscope] would bleed everything they could from the name, but let the product quality drop. This sort of attitude seems to be born of a feeling that really good audio must be built by small, comfortable outfits, rather than corporate giants." Superscope was a California-based company that had got its start about the same time as Marantz itself, but was initially in the business of making anamorphic lens systems for widescreen movies. By the 1960s, the four Tushinsky brothers, who owned the company, had shifted entirely to audio, notably as the US distributor for Sony tape-recording products. Superscope always used its own name along with Sony’s when advertising those products, which led many Americans to believe they were the same company. So there was a good deal of disappointment among those who felt that Marantz, a grand old American company, had sold out to a Japanese conglomerate. Ultimately, Superscope made the strategic error of declining to carry Sony’s non-tape products, which led the Japanese firm to set up its own American distribution network. Sony eventually pulled the plug on its tape products, leaving Superscope with its own brand name and that of Marantz. (Many 1970s Marantz tape products looked a lot like the Sony machines they replaced.) While the sale of Marantz to Superscope was not the sellout to the Japanese some thought it was, it did mark the end of the brand’s manufacturing in North America. Superscope shifted most of its electronics production to a Japanese company called Standard Radio, which they ultimately bought and renamed Marantz Japan. Superscope sold the Marantz brand in the early 1980s: the North American rights at first went to Dynascan, primarily a maker of test equipment, while for the rest of the world Marantz became part of the Philips stable, including Marantz Japan, in which the Dutch company held a controlling interest. Ultimately, Philips reunited the brand under its ownership by buying the American operation from Dynascan. Until that happened products made in North America that bore the Marantz name were entirely different from Marantz products made in the rest of the world. After the reunification, Philips used the Marantz brand for its higher-end audio products, trading on the name’s renown of some 50 years before. The manufacturing was still done in Japan, where most of the product development took place as well. What Marantz fans feared had happened in the 1960s finally became a reality several years ago, when Philips announced that it was turning worldwide responsibility for Marantz over Marantz Japan and selling enough of its interest to give up control. Thus, another of the most respected names in early audio joined such trailblazers as Fisher and McIntosh in becoming another Japanese brand. At the other end of the building . . . There is a footnote to the Superscope story. The main Tushinsky brother, Joseph, had a passion for player-piano rolls, and owned one of the largest collections of them in the world. Particularly precious were his "expression" rolls, which contained not only the notes but codes for the original performer’s dynamic interpretation as well. It was difficult to find pianos that could play these, so he set a portion of his engineering staff to developing what Superscope called the Pianocorder. The Pianocorder came in two forms. One involved gutting an existing piano and installing the mechanism that would operate the keys; the other, called a Vorsetzer, consisted essentially of 88 mechanical fingers that could be placed over the keyboard, and removed when not in use. Both were driven by digital tapes, which the device could also record. The idea was that anyone could have Artur Rubinstein playing in his or her living room. There was also a potential market in bars and restaurants, which could have live music without having to pay one of those pesky musicians. As it turned out, people who owned pianos were unwilling to have them ripped apart; Superscope eventually bought a piano manufacturing company so they could build in the Pianocorder from the start. That turned out to be not much more popular, and the whole scheme eventually disappeared, at least under the Superscope name. But at least Joe Tushinsky had been able to use the system to preserve his piano rolls. That’s one of the benefits of being the boss. ...Ian G. Masters
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