MR-88 Problem -- Anyone Else Have Problems With The Bar Tuning Indicator?

[Maks]

It is a great tuner. I have a modded MR74 that has a different sound, both are great, but the AM reception and HD content on the 88 combined with XM (I know, I know) make it the winner in my book.

[feinstei]

Great news!!! The MR-88 is fixed simply by applying the firmware update to v1.11 (I was running v1.10). The linear tuning dial now works perfectly again.

Some of you may remember that I was bitching about the fact that you could "brick" you MR-88 tuner if you didn't apply the update program using a Windows Vista computer or below (in other words, if you tried to update your MR-88, it would destroy it if you were running Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or 10. Well, McIntosh fixed the update program and it now works perfectly on the very latest (1-May) release of Windows 10. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE FIRMWARE UPDATE WILL FAIL IF YOU TRY TO RUN IT ON A COMPUTER THAT DOES NOT HAVE A GENUINE INTEL CPU!!!!!

I'm now a happy camper and was pleased that McIntosh took my bitching to Chuck Hinton to heart and fixed the update program.....

[Maks]

Also good to know that they now support modern Windows OSes. Great stuff!

[jdandy]

Originally Posted by Maks

Also good to know that they now support modern Windows OSes. Great stuff!

Steve.......No kidding. When I updated my MR88 to v:1.10 firmware the software only worked on a Windows XP platform. I had to drag out an old XP laptop I still had to get the firmware uploaded to the MR88. Good to hear the latest firmware works with WIN10. I will only load the newest firmware if I have an issue. Sorry to say but McIntosh firmware and implementation have a notorious reputation.

[Maks]

I'm with ya, Dan. Although I upgraded my MR-88 just fine so that XM would work, unless this tuner bar issue pops up, I'm not touching it.

[feinstei]

Maks (and anyone else who owns an MR-88)...

I will be happy to E-mail you (as I did jdandy) a copy of what I got from Chuck Hinton for upgrading to v1.11. That way, you can keep it around in case you ever need it. Just PM me your E-mail address...

What is insane about this problem is that I was operating perfectly fine with the old version v1.10 up until about 2 weeks ago, then all of a sudden, I had this "ghosting" of the linear tuning dial.

My question is what triggered the bug to appear?

In my experience, once firmware is "flashed" into non-volatile RAM, it really never changes so I don't think that the ghosting-lines problem came from NVRAM corruption. If NVRAM was truly corrupted, I would have expected the entire MR-88 to be "bricked", but it seems that only the linear tuning dial bug occurred.

Whatever it was, I'm really relieved that I didn't have to ship the MR-88 to Ryan. First of all because I adore this tuner and hate to part with it, but also because of the hassles and vagaries of shipping as well as the costs involved.

[Maks]

feinstei, at the job I mentioned where we had constant firmware issues it was related to the cheap flash ram we used. There can also be issues where the firmware itself is fine, but some combination of settings causes an unrelated issue. I've seen all sorts of one in a million bugs in my days installing network devices so I'm not surprised this issue could pop up. I found a bug in the C2300 firmware, but it's not a "everything was working one day and now it's not" kind of thing like you encountered. It's something I can repeat every time, but I know how to avoid it.

[feinstei]

I'm just grateful that YB-2 and yourself threw out the suggestion of reloading the firmware. Shipping the MR-88 to Audio Classics was something that I really dreaded doing, especially since the MR-88 is (stupidly and pointlessly) discontinued. I was actually going to drive out there and wait while they fixed it. As I've said, I believe this to be the best tuner ever made sound-wise and reception-wise (and that's in comparison to my Marantz 10B, Sequerra One, HK Citation IIIx, and Sony XDR-F1HD all of which are currently sitting in the closet unused).

[Maks]

That's what it's all about here--the community. Thanks for passing the fix info along to us. And most important, enjoy the MR88!