I ended up buying a used autonomic mms-2a and a mms-5a to compare to mb100. Mb100 is definitely based on mms-5a with some minor but important differences.
Minor stuff:
-Mms-5a has an intel board vs. asrock on mb100.
-Mms-5a has a case fan (blower style) connected to the case fan output on the intel motherboard. Mb100’s asrock motherhood also has this case fan controller but Mcintosh didn’t include the fan. Note that mms-5a case is significantly smaller than mb100’s.
-mms-5a has both the OS and media on the same 1tb hdd. Mb100 has a separate 32gb kingston ssd for the OS. They have the same OS however Mcintosh one is slightly modified as in Mcintosh OSD and having the media on a separate drive. I believe the OS is windows 7 based.
Big difference that will influence sound.
-mms-5a uses the 7.1 analog outputs of the intel motherboard. These 7.1 are configured into 4 pairs of stereo for 4 zones. Coax output is again from the motherland’s coaxsial tap. This means mms-5a uses the inferior dsp/dac on the low end intel motherland. No power noise isolation or other modifications.
-mb100 has a second daughterboard which has the dac and analog audio section as well as a usb audio to coax converter. It gets its signal from one of the usb headers on the asrock motherboard. Usb power cables are cut on this header so it’s only passing data. The daughter board has an isolation transformer on this signal path to further isolate the signal from the noisy motherboard.
The only flaw is the switch mode power supply provided and the 19.5V power is broken down to 12v, 5v and 3.3v on the motherboard before passed to the daughter board.
Also, the new mb50 seems to use the same layout as mb100. Uses a mini itx with a passively cooled cpu. Still runs the same OS, not the new linux based autonomic OS.
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