Why you should buy your plasma from us!

The first reason you should buy your plasma from us is that we sell Marantz. You get a great looking TV at a fair price with a three year warranty, parts and labor. Nobody else we’ve seen offers that.

Marantz has a great looking picture! All the AV magazines out there rate Marantz in the top echelon. They agree that motion artifacts are minimal due to Marantz’s advanced scaling circuitry. All you have to do is visit our store and you’ll be immediately impressed at Marantz’s performance.

But guess what? There are a number of companies that have pretty good looking plasmas. We’re not pretending that Marantz is the only good one. Just because Marantz is top notch doesn’t mean everybody else sells junk. So we need to analyze your plasma purchase a little further.

What about noise? Practically every plasma out there has an array of fans to deal with heat build up. These fans are somewhat noisy when you first turn the unit on. After the unit has been on for about 10-15 minutes, these fans crank into a higher gear. You’ll find a number of competitors even have a higher speed as they’ve been on longer! The Marantz 42 doesn’t need fans. It’s silent. The heat is dissipated via its metal chassis.

I recently went through the Parade of Homes. There were a variety of plasmas on display. Some of them had fans cranking so loudly that it embarrassed the builders! They excused, "Well it’s been on all day." "I didn’t know it was so noisy. I wouldn’t buy one of those!"

They blamed the installations, "It’s mounted on the wall so the sound bounces off and reflects into the room. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t on the wall." "It’s in a cabinet and the depth of the cabinet resonates like a speaker cabinet. It wouldn’t be so loud if it wasn’t in that cabinet." These are the two most common uses of plasma TVs. With Marantz… no problem!

The noise issue IS AN ISSUE because if you’re watching a movie that is largely dialogue, the speakers have to play louder than the fans in your plasma. As the plasma’s fans change in pitch, you will have to change the volume of the movie, unless you’re a loud listener to begin with!

If you owned a power amp in the old days that had a fan, or if you’ve had a computer a long time, you’ve noticed that fans get noisier as they age. Eventually they can develop quite an annoying rattle.

You don’t tend to notice the fan noise in a superstore show room. After all, the environment itself is annoying, with multiple music systems blasting away. How can you deduce if the plasma will be quiet in your room?

Picture quality varies quite a bit among plasmas. The inexpensive ones are hounded by artifacts and distortion. Some folks have a keen eye and find these distortions annoying. Others are less discriminating and don’t even notice. Our experience is, people with a good ear often have a good eye. If you can appreciate a nice audio system, you probably won’t be happy with a cheapy, grainy looking plasma.

Set up. Set up of your system with Cable TV boxes or HD DSS receivers is NOT a slam dunk. There are a number of steps necessary to get the picture and sound RIGHT in your system. When we install a plasma system and the cable company visits later to connect HDTV, we get called almost 100% of the time because things aren’t right! We find a myriad of mistakes they make. It’s a shame that many people are buying reasonably expensive equipment from the superstores and not even getting it connected properly! How good a deal was it if you got a "good deal" on a cheap plasma TV and it’s not even hooked up properly?

No, we don’t give things away. We sell great gear at a fair price. Then we connect it properly and give you good service if things act up. Sometimes that happens too. Even the best gear is a bucket of bolts on occasion. We’ll make it right or exchange it.