Marantz CD80

Lampizator installed in summer 2006


This is a player that looks and feels like a typical "bolid" Heavy and solid, large, macho machine. But on close inspection - the weight comes from the cast-iron cheek additions. And the heavy floor plate. So the weight aspect is a fake one.
The PCB is large, typical messy Marantz. Not very clean. The DAC is far far away from RCA outputs, indicating tons of garbage in between.
The mechanism is a well known CDM1 mk2. The regulators of supplies sit on a heatsink, far far away from receiving parts. Not too good.
The TDA1541A-S1 dac is of course a good one.
Without hesitation I lampized it with a I/U conversion by 80 Ohms and 6H1P tubes. the result is as expected - a very good one but not as great as the weight. This player set the expectations so high, that it disappoints a little at the end.  Later I found that the 6N2P (6H2P) tube is MUCH better for this dac chip.

Tuning of Marantz CD-80


This player does not require cap modifications like cheap Marantz CD40, Marantz CD-50 and 60. It is already good  in the cap department. Of course it may be fully blackgated and it will benefit. I rank this player very high, although a touch below the Philips CD880 and Sony 227ESD. It is about equal to Revox 226/126 and Marantz 94 MK1.

Below - the Marantz CD80 is second from top. On top - the 94MK2.

Comparing the Marantz CD80  to his older cousin




Two competing Marantz'es side by side. Which one wins ???



The marantz in companion of very strong contenders to the throne. Sony 227ESD and the old king - Grundig Fine Arts 9009 on the bottom.







The main PCB - huge one, but quite chaotic. DAC is tooo far from RCA outputs. Long cables are necessary addition for lampization.



Our well known transformer, similar to Philips CD-880. 
Mechanism - as well - Philips CDM1MK2 like in the grundig 9009, cambridge CD3 and Philips CD880.

Laser assembly of CDM1 MK2 in the Marantz








Very nice ELNA premium capacitors in main power supply.





The DAC has already the good MKT caps around (blue boxes) for decoupling. Only 100nF but nevertheless good. 220 nF or even 470 nF would have been better.




New Lampizator  power supply installed on the middle partitioning rail.





Lampizator's Noval sockets installed ...

SOUND of lampized CD 80

The amount of circuitry that the simple lampizator bypasses rewards us with great sound improvement. The stock form CD80 is not impressive at all.
After lampization, it is as good as any other TDA1541A player. I did not do the NOS mod but of course I should have done it. It would improve the player further step up.
 To further improve it,  for tuning of the Marantz, I suggest not to change caps but to buy a bag of 20 tantalums something like 47uF by 16 V and on the bottom of PCB bypass every electrolyte there is, except of course the useless analog stage.
Lampizator on floated pins 6/25 will give as much improvement as the whole tuning of the PCB.
An icing on the cake would be the clock, maybe not necessarily the 200 GBP one from Europe, on ebay there are 30 USD clocks from china. They are good enough. The fact that the clock has its own power supply and does not contaminate the PCB with digital hash has huge benefit, even if jitter  issue is not much imporoved.


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