The Perfection of Mcintosh Amplifiers and where best to find
them
McIntosh has been making amplifiers for a long, long time
since 1949 infact, when the company was first incorporated
as McIntosh Engineering labatory and moved from Washington
D.C to silver spings Maryland. However, the seeds were
planted as far back as 1942 when Frank McIntosh started a
small company consulting on radio station design and sound
systems. He was not satisfied with the quality of the audio
amplifiers around at the time, so he invented one that gave
high power with low distortion. Then in 1946, McIntosh
recruited Gordon Gow, who was young but a brilliant
engineer, and was pivotal in making his dream real. What
they came up with was called the McIntosh 50W1 Unity Coupled
Amplifier. It delivered fifty watts of power with less than
1% distortion in the 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz range. So McIntosh,
the company, arrived in the world with a bang.
See
Simwith Caldoe’s website with a huge range and some great
prices with McIntosh Amplifiers
Since it’s inception Mcintosh has been a consistent
innovator in amplification. Seen by many as it’s greatest
achievement was the 1967 introduction of the MC2505. It was
the primary separate solid state power amplifier made by
McIntosh. It was a huge leap in amplifier history and was
the forerunner of many of the features still used in the
amplifier world today. Among it’s list of many firsts was an
all-glass front panel, Sentry Monitor circuitry, illuminated
output level meters, autoformers and panloc mounting. The
autoformers of the MC2505 were a totally new idea in
McIntosh transformer design history.
18 years ago the company was bought out. It was also the
year of Frank’s death and some believed that it was also be
the end of the company as it was known. However they were
wrong, the innovation and high standards did not change. The
company today is still much the same as in it’s beginnings
with some of the finest amplifiers anywhere and simlar
designs to the originals.
One thing that makes McIntosh amplifier designs very
different from others is the use of output transformers,
their range includes the MC2102, MC2000, MC275 and the MC602
. The McIntosh Amplifier MC-602 is a 600 watt rms per
channel, two channel power amplifier, and weighs around 70
kgs. It has 24 output transistors per channel, a 1.5 kVA
toroidal transformer, four (two per channel) 27,000 F
capacitors, that has 70 Volts, for 265J of energy storage.
It can output 10w per channel in Class A, and the rest in
Class A/B. 35 dB of negative feedback are used. This
Mcintosh amplifier is fully balanced from input to output.
This baby retails at $8k and sounds like heaven, enough
said.
Now most of the competition use output from just the plates
in the output tubes. However McIntosh are somewhat different
taking only 50% from there and the rest coming out of the
cathodes, which allows the energy to come across the whole
of the tub.
So why can’t McIntosh’s competitors replicate the
amplifiers? After all the patent ran out years before. Well,
the output transformers are still woven at headquaters and
these give McIntosh their incredible performance at extreme
levels and can’t be copied.
Another factor in Mcintosh’s success was the innovative
campaign to market it’s amplifiers called the Mcintosh
Amplifier Clinic. Despite the fact that the guys knew they
were the best out there, how could they make the customers
understand that? Simple really, just show them! They went
out and tested right in front of the customers in the shops.
McIntosh Amplifiers can sometimes be hard to find, but with
the internet there are always some around, just have a look!
See
Simwith Caldoe’s website with a huge range and some great
prices with McIntosh Amplifiers
