The McIntosh Room

This room exists to be rearranged. Every amplifier in it is live, every loudspeaker is connected, and any combination can be set up while you wait. It is the only room in either showroom built around reconfiguration rather than around a finished system.

The C12000 at the centre

McIntosh’s two-chassis flagship preamplifier carries both solid-state and vacuum tube output stages, selectable per source. That is an unusual thing to build. It means the character of the front end is itself one of the variables you can change without swapping a box, and it means the tube-versus-transistor question can be asked at the preamplifier independently of what is happening at the power amplifier.

Most comparisons of that kind are confounded, because changing the preamplifier usually means changing the interconnect, the rack position and the setup along with it. Here it is a switch.

The amplifiers

The amplification spans McIntosh’s range and both of its philosophies. The MC2301 is a 300-watt vacuum tube monoblock built on the patented Unity Coupled Circuit output transformer — the design McIntosh has refined since the 1940s and the reason their tube amplifiers hold a loudspeaker the way they do.

The MC611 is its solid-state counterpart at 600 watts. The MC462 is the 450-watt stereo amplifier that anchors most serious McIntosh systems, and the MA12000 folds the whole idea into one box: tube preamplification driving solid-state Autoformer output at 350 watts a channel.

The MC901, which refuses to choose

The MC901 is the most interesting box in the room. It puts a 300-watt vacuum tube amplifier and a 600-watt solid-state amplifier into a single chassis, and uses them together to biamplify one loudspeaker — tubes on the midrange and treble, solid state on the woofer.

That is not a compromise between the two positions. It is an argument that the question was wrong to begin with: valves do what they do best in the range where their character is audible, transistors supply current where the woofer needs control, and each is asked to do only the part it is suited to. Whether that reasoning holds is exactly the sort of thing this room lets you settle by ear.

Three Sonus faber loudspeakers

Three loudspeakers receive all of it. Il Cremonese is the Reference Collection tribute to Stradivari’s 1715 violin, at 92 dB and reaching 35 Hz. Amati G5 is the Homage flagship, 91 dB and 28 Hz. Serafino G2 is the compact Homage floorstander at 90 dB and 30 Hz.

The sensitivities sit within two decibels of each other, which is what makes the comparison fair — differences you hear are differences in the loudspeakers rather than in how loud each one happens to play from the same volume setting.

Sources

Digital comes from the MCD12000, which carries the same dual-output architecture as the C12000 and doubles as a reference DAC, with the dCS Lina alongside it for a second opinion from a different house. The MCD12000 also plays SACD, which matters for anyone with a physical library rather than a purely digital one, and it means the room can compare disc playback against streaming through the same preamplifier without introducing another variable into the chain.

The system in this room

• McIntosh C12000 two-chassis preamplifier — solid-state and vacuum tube output stages
• McIntosh MC2301 vacuum tube monoblocks — 300 W, Unity Coupled Circuit
• McIntosh MC901 — 300 W tube and 600 W solid state in one chassis, biamplifying a single loudspeaker
• McIntosh MC611 solid-state monoblocks — 600 W
• McIntosh MC462 stereo amplifier — 450 W
• McIntosh MA12000 integrated amplifier — 350 W per channel
• McIntosh MCD12000 SACD/CD player and DAC
• dCS Lina DAC
• Sonus faber Il Cremonese, Amati G5 and Serafino G2 loudspeakers

Hearing it

What this adds up to is a room where the questions people actually argue about — tubes or transistors, monoblocks or stereo, integrated or separates — can be settled by ear in an afternoon rather than by reading. Almost nobody gets to run those comparisons properly, because it requires a dealer willing to keep every option connected at once.

The McIntosh Room is in the Scottsdale showroom. Walk in during business hours, or book ahead and tell us which combinations you want set up, so the room is arranged around your questions before you arrive.