There Will Always Be a McIntosh

[62caddy]

Came across this while perusing old issues of the "big three" high fidelity magazines: Audio, High Fidelity and Stereo Review.

This article was published in the November 1985 issue of Stereo Review - a bit more than the halfway point between McIntosh's founding in 1949 and now. A lot of what was said then still applies today.

Hope it provides enjoyable reading for first timers or as a trip down memory lane for those formerly avid hi-fi magazine readers back in the day.

- Eric/ 62caddy.

There Will Always Be a McIntosh

by Ralph Hodges

THIRTY years ago, the U.S. high-fidelity market virtually belonged to Scott and Fisher, if you had to respect a budget, and Marantz and McIntosh if you did not. Ownership of either of the M's was so unassailably "high end" that the less fortunate were not permitted even to question its desirability when ladies were present.

Today, the first three companies have become essentially offshore enterprises, justifiably proud of their names and histories but with the ubiquitous Made in You -Know - Where legends on their products' rear panels. But McIntosh? McIntosh components are still made in Binghamton, New York, just as they used to be and probably ever shall be. And to say "made" there is no exaggeration.

According to Gordon Gow, McIntosh's chief executive officer and one of the company's founders in 1949, "We of course acquire knobs, switches, controls, tuning capacitors, and the like from the Far East, because we can't find their equivalent here, and it would not be practical or important to make them ourselves. But all our chassis components, our front panels, our transformers, our speaker -driver assemblies, and the rest of the crucial elements originate on the premises." And so they do. The complex of three buildings-one of them a converted bowling alley that now houses a respectably large anechoic chamber and a complete photo -pro- duction studio ("We were never happy with outside work") represents the kind of vertical manufacturing facility that is rare to vanishing in this country.

With a preamplifier, a tuner, Several power amplifiers, a receiver, a remote -control system, several speaker systems, and a CD player (an elaboration of a Philips design and apparently the only thing of significance for which an outside supplier is vital), McIntosh is, astonishingly, our last remaining full -line audio manufacturer. And there is much more to come. A projection - TV audio/video complex is now running in prototype form, and the company has taken what is called a "serious" stockholders' position in Compusonics, the Palo Alto organization that is trying to record audio on floppy discs via a novel digital transform and expects to be waging successful battle against digital audio cassettes in a few years.

But what is McIntosh that the high -end audiophile should pay attention to it? The company advertises only enough to keep the cognoscenti aware that it's still alive (and McIntosh executives freely admit there have been times when it almost wasn't). It does not solicit magazine test reports and, in fact, has a long history of resisting them. It is obsessed with cosmetic details-perhaps, one worries, to the exclusion of other, weightier matters. Possibly worst of all, its products are eagerly bought by doctors and lawyers without ever really being listened to, just as the same consumer group buys Rolls Royces without ever really driving them.

But there's another side of the coin. Even if those doctors and lawyers don't really listen, McIntosh's own people tend to, if record collections of 2,000 and living rooms littered with CD's are any indication. Although the expense of a McIntosh system can be truly hideous, there is no evidence that any McIntosh executive ever lost sleep over it, the prices being honestly representative of what was built in. The philosophy of "pay a little less, hear a little less" seems alien in Binghamton. People blink at you and change the subject. Every McIntosh product is the best statement on the technology McIntosh can make at the time, and the pricing comes later, an attitude that apparently engenders respect and a comfortable confidence in McIntosh worshipers.

So do the cosmetics, which are extravagantly designed to outlive the owner. When an especially antique McIntosh comes in for service, the folks from the front office turn up to admire it. And if it isn't all that admirable (there are stories of amplifiers that have taken bullets from outraged wives who thought new shoes for the children a greater priority), it will be before it leaves, and for a charge that makes your dry-cleaning bill seem exorbitant.

McIntosh's vacuum -tube technology is the oldest and among the most venerated in the business. Yet at a time when tube gear enjoys considerable high -end popularity, nothing new in this line comes from Binghamton. To ask why produces general weeping, wailing, and wall - pounding. "It's the tubes," explains Gow. "It kills us to recondition one of our classic old products and have to send it back with the original tubes, but we cannot find replacements that will serve. Certainly we could not justify a new product based on today's tubes. Our customers would haul us into court, and they'd be right!" What this says about manufacturers who do use today's tubes is debatable. But what it says about circuit design that permits tubes to be still usable after twenty years or so is impressive.

In any case, what does an all - McIntosh system of today sound like? On the basis of hearing two of them, I'd say expensive, potent, polite (too polite?), and somewhat underdamped in the low frequencies. The sophistication of the high -frequency array for the XRT 18 speaker system may be hard to touch with anything much short of a well -executed ribbon design. As for the low bass, I suspect it will serve McIntosh owners, present and future, very well.