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In Reply to: RE: mac c20 rebuild posted by Michael Samra on May 01, 2008 at 15:26:18
Hi, Mike:
My experience, going back over twenty years to the era of the famous McIntosh (Dealer-Sponsored) Performance Clinics, provided me with evidence which clearly demonstrated the improvement in performance between an unrestored preamp and one which had undergone cap replacement.
The total harmonic distortion usually go down significantly at the very low and upper end of the frequency spectrum, measured with about 2.0 v out on their analyzers.
It is always with extreme fondness that I remember bringing some of my old units to these events and they were REAL EVENTS in my life!
It was great to see the expressions of utter astonishment on the faces of folks who brought in anything other than Mac tube gear in those days, just as the McIntosh engineers (the late Dave O'Brien and Richard Evans), tore apart a McIntosh amp or preamp and replaced tubes for free, tweaked this or that, sprayed out all of the controls and got these old units to meet or exceed the published specs.
The C-20, as far as I know, does not utilize those embedded networks for RIAA and such, as do all of the C-11 and C-22's out there. They are often prone to failure, causing all sorts of problems in achieving accurate EQ and raising distortion levels significantly. One must cobble up breadboarded replacements if one wants to correct them all. There are no replacement parts at all and those disappeared over twenty years ago.
Onwards!
Enjoy your lovely C-20.
As long as your main potentiometer holds up, you are set for life, man!
Richard Links
Berkeley, CA
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