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Sonnova wrote:

They sure used to. At one time, official McIntosh dealers would hold
amplifier "clinics" in which factory technicians with a truckload of
equipment would set-up in a dealer's premisses and would check-out, adjust
and repair - without cost (!) any McIntosh amp or preamp brought in by
its owner, regardless of age, and do so RIGHT THERE. If the amp needed new
output tubes, it got new output tubes. If it needed new capacitors, it got
new capacitors. That's what I call customer service. Of course, they
stopped doing that sometime in the 1970's.

McIntosh also encouraged their dealers to purchase expensive stereo
microscopes enabling them to inspect phono styli. With a dealer in my
area, this was a free service--to anyone. Although I never owned Mac gear
(I was a kid at the time) the dealer never balked at helping me out.

I am glad McIntosh has survived (although back then the equipment was simply
good value and built well, it is now priced distinctly in the
statosphere--maybe the result of not moving manufaturing facilities to
China). Sadly, in the late 70s and early 80s the high-end press always
talked the company down. In those days, you "needed" Levinson, or Audio
Research gear. It was just the way it was.

You have a point. I had a pair of Acoustat Spectra 11s once and sold them
because their transformer wasn't very well designed and they would get
congested sounding as they got loud almost like a very poorly designed
broadcast limiter. The music would build to a crescendo, but at some point
would stop getting louder (even though it was supposed to) and each
increase in orchestra output would result in nothing but more and more
distortion until ultimately, they became unlistenable unless one turned
the volume down to point where the amp was no longer overloading the
transformer. Not very useful by today's standards.

Yes. Ironically, you also needed a beefy amp to drive the speakers. I
destroyed a decent, but typically adequate amp trying to drive Acoustats.
I was eventually forced to purchase the large Acoustat amp; yet, in spite
of the quality and power of this large mos-fet amp, the speaker always
sounded best at low levels.

Back in the 80s there were a lot of bad sounding speakers. The Acoustats
were not "bad" sounding. They just had a lot of limitations, and were
never SOA.

Michael