Marantz PM7000N weirdness with USB thumb drive

[jkwasnik]

Hello --
My wife and I gifted ourselves with a new amp/receiver. It replaced the 40+ year-old beast which was acting up too much. I love the new features, and having hi-res FLAC file support is a special treat.
But the current head-scratcher is just this USB support. I first used a small thumb drive with some test samples. The unit cataloged all the track info. So then I got a larger drive with many albums, but I left off the test files. It cataloged the new files, too, but still listed the ones that weren't there. It seemed like it tried to find them on the new drive. It stopped playing, then reported that no USB drive was installed. This is too bad, because I expected to be using several USB drives. So far, I can only get the original drive to work in the unit.
Does anyone know how to purge the internal catalog, short of doing a whole system reset?
Thanks in advance,
John Kwasnik
Sacramento, CA

 

[Grayson Dere]

This is a strange occurrence...it sounds like something best left for customer support from your A/V Receiver manufacturer. I'm positive they'll have a good answer for this : )

Just curious, what make/model is your A/V Receiver? Thanks!

 

[jkwasnik]

I figured out the problem and wrote to Marantz support, below. They told me my thumb drive was defective.

Hello --

I figured out what happened, and it qualifies for a bug report, so here's the details:

→ Marantz PM7000N Network Integrated Amplifier
→ Serial # BLL27190900345
→ setup reports firmware is up-to-date (ought to be an option to report firmware version!)


The bug is that the USB playback retains the queue when you switch thumb drives. HEOS offers an option to delete all items in a queue. This is not possible from the remote, or the front panel.

The test:

→ Thumb drive A has track B, and drive X has track Y. No tracks in common.
→ Play B on drive A, then switch to drive X. B is still in the queue.
→ If you select track Y, but choose "Play Now & Replace Queue", then all is well.
→ But, if you choose "Play Now" (which is the tempting first option!), B is still in the queue. But B isn't there! The unit is confused, and reports the drive is defective. There is not a way out of this without using the HEOS queue management function. Users without mobile devices with HEOS installed are out of luck.

Recommendation:
USB devices have unique identifiers. The firmware should be corrected to detect a change in device, and automatically clear the queue. For now, at least edit the user manual to warn people to Play Now / Replace when switching thumb drives. The manual is only available online, so it shouldn't be that hard.


You're welcome in advance,

John Kwasnik