Scottsdale Hall

The hall system is the one people hear before anyone has offered to demonstrate anything, and it was specified on that basis. Sonus faber Lilium — the Reference Collection floorstander — driven by a pair of McIntosh MC1.25KW monoblocks, against an exposed brick wall that gives the space a character none of the treated demonstration rooms have.

The room itself

A hall is not an acoustically designed space, and this one makes no claim to be. The wall behind the system is exposed brick, the floor is carpeted, and the pair stands wide with the electronics between them on an open rack. Nothing is hidden and nothing is treated.

That is worth saying plainly, because Lilium is a loudspeaker most dealers would only show in a controlled room. It is a 3.5-way dual-cabinet design — a lyre-shaped front cabinet for forward emission, and a separate rear enclosure dedicated to infra-low frequencies with a tuned passive radiator, decoupled at 90 degrees from the main cabinet. Deep Low Control on the rear panel adjusts infra-bass level and damping to the space, which is how a loudspeaker reaching 20 Hz stays civil in a room nobody designed for it.

System — Sonus faber Lilium on McIntosh MC1.25KW

Lilium is rated at 92 dB sensitivity into a 4-ohm nominal load and accepts 100 to 800 watts of undistorted power. The MC1.25KW delivers 1,250 watts into 8, 4, or 2 ohms through the McIntosh Autoformer — full rated power regardless of what the loudspeaker's impedance curve does at the bottom end. Against a design with a dedicated infra-woofer and a 20 Hz floor, that is not a specification detail. It is the reason the pairing works.

The front end is a C22 Mk V vacuum tube preamplifier, the fifth generation of a design that goes back to the 1960s — tube gain stages behind the mint-green lettering and analog meter face McIntosh has kept for six decades. Sources are a McIntosh MT2 precision turntable and a Linn Klimax DS network music player. An MC462 stereo amplifier sits on the rack alongside them. Transparent Plus cabling throughout.

The combination is deliberate. Tube preamplification into solid-state power is the configuration McIntosh systems have been built around for most of the company's history, and the hall demonstrates it before a visitor has walked into a single treated room.

The system in this room

• Sonus faber Lilium loudspeakers
• McIntosh MC1.25KW monoblock amplifiers, one per channel
• McIntosh C22 Mk V vacuum tube preamplifier
• McIntosh MC462 stereo amplifier
• McIntosh MT2 precision turntable
• Linn Klimax DS network music player
• Transparent Plus cabling

Hearing it

You do not need to book the hall — you walk past it. Come in during business hours at Scottsdale and it will be playing. If you would like it set up for a particular record, or a prepared comparison against one of the demonstration rooms, call ahead and we will have it ready.