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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

[Sonnova]

On Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:47:04 -0700, wrote
(in article ):

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 too was a kid but my dad owned McIntosh amps and a tuner/pre-amp.

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.

A McIntosh M75 monoblock was 75 Watts (in the early '60's) and cost over $250
(this is when a Dynaco MkIII sold for about $80). That's at least $2-$3000 in
today's money, meaning that two of them would cost $400 or the equivalent of
$4-$6,000 2008 worthless Bush Bucks. I'd say that since today's Mac MC275 amp
is $4500 Bush Bucks, that McIntosh equipment is still pretty much the same
value it was then and has just kept-up with inflation.

McIntosh sort of lost their way in the 1970s with the introduction of
solid-state gear. Their expertise was in their exquisite bifilar wound output
transformers. Of course, transistor amps don't need output transformers, but
McIntosh's early SS designs incorporated them anyway (interstage transformers
too, IIRC). The result was that Mac 1st (and possibly second) generation
Solid-State amps didn't sound even as good as other companies' early
transistor efforts, and THEY were often lousy (early Dynaco ST-120s, and
Harmon-Kardon Citation 12s for instance). Add to that a cheaper, "budget"
line called simply 'Mac' and made in Japan, and you have a perfect recipe for
a more than slightly tarnished reputation. The high-end press in those days
was having none of it, of course and saw McIntosh's fall as illustrative of
the plight of the entire audio community as company after company abandoned
decent performing tube designs for lousy sounding, unreliable solid-state.

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.

No, not at all. I always thought my Spectra 11s sounded great a low volumes.
They were far from bad sounding. They just couldn't play at anything
approaching "realistic" volume levels, even in a relatively small room.

[[email protected]]

Sonnova wrote:

The high-end press in those
days was having none of it

The high-end press in those days was self absorbed and not very rigorous in
their ways (with one exception). From them, I would not place much value
in what was going down.

No, not at all. I always thought my Spectra 11s sounded great a low
volumes. They were far from bad sounding. They just couldn't play at
anything approaching "realistic" volume levels, even in a relatively small
room.

Read closely what I wrote. I never said they were bad sounding. They just
had limitations, and were never SOA. For a reasonably priced speaker they
were OK.

Michael