There's a version of this hobby where everything has to match — same decade, same country of origin, preferably same shelf. The Garrard goes with the Quad, the Thorens goes with the Marantz, and nobody puts a DSP-equipped Canadian AV receiver in the same room as a vintage Rega. I understand that world. I also think it leaves a lot of great gear on the table.
The Anthem MRX 540 came out in 2020 as the middle child in Anthem's MRX lineup — above the 340, below the 740H, which adds Atmos height channels that most of us will never use. It's a seven-channel AV receiver at its core, but the two-channel performance is what makes it worth talking about here. Anthem built this thing around their ARC Genesis room correction system, which is genuinely good — not "good for room correction" good, but actually good, full stop.
What ARC Genesis Actually Does
Most room correction systems flatten everything into a kind of processed sameness. ARC Genesis doesn't. It measures, it compensates for the room's actual acoustic problems, and then it mostly leaves the signal alone. The result is a tighter low end and better imaging without that characteristic DSP smear that makes you want to switch it off after twenty minutes.
Running it on a good CD player — a Rotel RCD-06, a Cambridge CXC into a decent DAC, your inherited Marantz CD6006 — and the combination is genuinely hard to argue with. The MRX 540 puts out 100 watts per channel into 8 ohms with all channels driven, which is not a marketing spec cherry-picked at 2 channels and idle. Anthem quotes that number honestly, and it shows in the dynamics.
The preamp section is clean enough that you're not fighting the amplifier to hear what your source is doing. This is the thing people don't say enough about modern receivers: when they're built right, they get out of the way. The MRX 540 gets out of the way.
The phono stage is missing, which will matter to some of you. Budget for a decent external one — a Pro-Ject Phono Box S3 or a Parks Audio Budgie — and the problem disappears. This is not a dealbreaker, it's just a line item.
At $3,500 to $4,500 used, you're getting performance that competes with separates costing considerably more, plus a room correction system that separates costing considerably more don't include. The app is fine. The HDMI connectivity means it doubles as your actual home theater amp, which is either irrelevant to you or a genuine bonus depending on how many boxes your wife is willing to let you stack.
The one honest caveat: the fan. Under heavy load, the MRX 540 runs a cooling fan that is audible in a quiet room during quiet passages. It's not loud, but if you're the kind of listener who sits in silence between tracks and stares at the ceiling, you'll hear it. Anthem addressed this in firmware updates, and later production units run cooler, but it hasn't been entirely eliminated. Know that going in.
What this amp rewards is source quality and speaker quality. Give it a good CD transport or a properly set-up turntable and a pair of speakers that can actually resolve detail, and it will tell you exactly what it's hearing. That's all you can ask of an amplifier.