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In Reply to: RE: The old McIntosh XR series posted by airtime on July 26, 2016 at 08:10:12
Thanks for that insight. As you know, Mac made their name in high quality (and pricey!) amps. But I've yet to hear great things about their speakers. That XR-7 and on the down the line covey quality construction. The sound, I guess, was something else, and if they couldn't stand up to mass produced brands like Pioneer, they must have sounded awful. AR I've never heard, but I have to disagree with your assessment of JBL. Some of those models from the 70s sounded pretty good, the bookshelf L-166 and the floor-standing with sub-woofer L-212 being examples. Well, when it comes to loudspeakers, it's all subjective anyway, right?
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Those old Mac speakers really sucked. I don't think that anything could be done to fix their horrible sound.
The old JBL's (L100, etc) and old AR's (AR3a, etc) for example were designed for totally different tastes and were just fine as long as you recognized that and shopped accordingly.
Nothing could/would help the Macs. Even those with hearing defects and/or poor taste had problems liking them. Notice that they weren't around for very long.
One of my friends was a Mac dealer and managed an audio shop located in Bethesda, MD (Montgomery county, one of the highest per-capita income areas in the US back then) in the early 1970's. He would laugh when he told me that the average customer who purchased an all McIntosh system (including those horrible speakers) back then was usually a wealthy doctor who had no particular musical tastes, just wanted "the best". Called them "the rich mans Bose". ;-)
Bethesda IS an upscale area, been down there from Baltimore many times. Like you said, I guess those wealthy doctors were clueless when it came to recognizing good sound. David Drucker, editor of a long defunct audio magazine, in his "Speakers '82" issue, praised the XR-7 to the skies. When used with Mac's equalizer, he wrote, there was no better performance from any other speaker "regardless of price." Guess you can't believe all you read and hear.
Okay, so what about Mac's latter speakers, the ones with multiple drivers and such? Were they an improvement?
My experience is very different than what has been written here. The McIntosh XR series was manufactured to be used in conjunction with an equalizer that McIntosh produced. I owned XR5's for 20 years and for the first 5 of those years I didn't use the equalizer. I then found out how good they could sound when the EQ was added. Most people didn't have the associated EQ and have developed an opinion without having all the facts. AA seems to attract the McIntosh haters crowd and that's a shame. Most people would love to own McIntosh they just don't want to pony up for it and I think they compensate by bashing it. I had a pair of Rectilinear III's and AR3a's as well during this timeframe. The speakers were driven by other McIntosh equipment (Mc2125 and C27). There is no doubt that for most music the McIntosh speakers were clearly superior and I could A/B two sets at a time. Wasn't close. Their strengths where in their ability to deliver astonishing SPL's, solid deep bass and they were fun to listen to, never fatiguing. And they never, ever sounded "bright". They were incredible "solid" sounding and never "strained or etched". The AR3's (still have them) were better for Jazz only, but IMHO terrible with rock music. They were also fragile, especially the tweeters. Aside from the AR3's historical significance, I'd take the XR5's any day. The XR7's mentioned in the post were just "grand". Certainly not speakers for everyone, but they don't deserve the bashing in the previous posts. I
Oh and by the way, it's obvious from these pages that McIntosh knew little about speaker design.
http://www.roger-russell.com/lsd1.htm
http://www.roger-russell.com/lsd2.htm
No one ever said Mac knew little about design. Only that their speakers were designed to a specific taste or for a specific reason. Obviously it wasn't a commonly accepted reason but it was theirs.
The equalizer thing I really didn't understand. Wouldn't the average speaker buyer want a speaker that had a flat FR curve and played as true to the music as possible. Not take a crack at it with an equalizer??
You don't understand the main purpose of the McIntosh equalizer. It's used to flatten the deep bass because the speakers roll off at a very high point otherwise. The purpose of this is to over damp the bass to better control overhang, the price of which was this early roll off the equalizer corrects.
A good speaker design should take care of that. Why add A TON of potentiometers in the signal path. Just make a good speaker.I've had equalizers and it's like taking the long way home. And you really don't get there. In the end I scrapped the entire setup.
Edits: 07/26/16
I agree with Airtime. A good speaker design reproduces all music well and does not need an equalizer to sound the way the music should sound. An equalizer, to my understanding, is an optional device for the listener to shape the sound to his or her liking, not to bring the speakers up to speed. My ADS 1230s sound great with all forms of music, from classical to rock. I've never once found the need to add an equalizer to "improve" the sound.
...but the equalization is invisible because it's incorporated into the crossover in the form of notch filters, shelving, broad response shaping, phase shifting for time alignment and so on. All this done at high level using bulky, less than perfect passives.
A speaker specific equalizer is usually a much better option. Note that these line level equalizers are not the typical 1/3 octave things with a bazillion slider pots. The Mac MQ101 (for ML-1C and a few others) has 3 switched freq adj ranges for low, mid and high. Not a pot in sight.
Because it provides extremely tight bass. And while I've never heard the McIntosh implementation I've heard it in two other commercial designs done by close friends and it works wonderfully. An example of the best bass I ever heard was at HP's using the Scaena speakers and HP was in awe.
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