The Absolute Sound’s Illustrated History of High-End Audio - Volume 2

Preface

BY R O B E RT H A R L EY

This second book in the three-volume series The Absolute Sound’s Illustrated History of High-End Audio brings you the inside stories of the pioneering individuals who founded legendary electronics companies and created history’s most iconic preamplifiers, power amplifiers, and phono preamplifiers. Our first volume, published in 2013, documented the history of high-end loudspeakers, and the third book, on analog and digital sources, will complete the trilogy in 2017.

These are the stories of high-end audio’s true originators—who they are, how they came to start their companies, their challenges, their triumphs, and their core beliefs about how music reproduction systems should be designed and built. While each story is unique, and the technologies employed are often wildly disparate, all the engineers and designers in this book share a drive toward perfection, toward pushing the envelope just a little further and achieving greater and greater fidelity with every new design. Collectively they have founded iconic companies that form the bedrock of the high-end audio industry today.

In this second volume, we’ve taken a somewhat different organizational approach. Rather than present the most significant technologies, products, companies, and individuals purely sequentially as we did in Volume One, we’ve organized the book into sections structured around the major themes that shaped the high end. The period from 1945 to 1970—what we call the “High-Fidelity Era”—saw the invention of a new industry made possible by the widespread commercialization of advances developed in research laboratories in the preceding decades. This seminal period is defined by such legendary marques as Marantz, McIntosh, Harman Kardon, Dynaco, Fisher, and Scott and, toward the end of the Sixties, new players such as Crown and SAE.

That ethos—in which no measures are deemed too extreme in pursuit of musical realism—is the thread that connects them all.

But these storied brands came under formidable competition with the rise of Japan’s huge consumerelectronics companies, a trend we document in “The Japanese Contribution.” Ironically, Japan’s marketplace dominance became the impetus behind yet another large-scale development: the creation of the modern high-end audio industry. Beginning in about 1970, an explosion of creativity laid the foundation of the high end as we know it. Reacting in part to the “specsmanship” of mass-market Japanese and American solid-state electronics, a whole new generation of designers and entrepreneurs from all over the world reinvented the technologies, the business models, and even the marketing of high-fidelity music-reproduction systems. In the U.S., Mark Levinson’s MLAS, Bob Carver’s Phase Linear, Nelson Pass’ Threshold, and James Bongiorno’s Great American Sound company are just a few of the trailblazers who set the stage in the first half of that revolutionary decade. These newcomers, and others, are chronicled in “The High End Responds.”

Simultaneously, the vacuum tube, cast aside years earlier as an antiquated relic, was about to enjoy a renaissance that proved as surprising as it was powerfully influential. When William Zane Johnson founded the Audio Research Corporation in 1970, he singlehandedly began a revolution that continues to flourish to this day. That iconic company produced a series of groundbreaking products that not only resurrected tube circuitry, but also brought that technology’s beloved sound qualities into the modern

era. Today’s designers of both solid-state and tube amplifiers undeniably have been influenced by Johnson’s efforts, whether they realize it or not.

“The Tube Renaissance,” as we call it, is still going strong as evidenced by companies such as ConradJohnson, VTL, Balanced Audio Technology, Jadis, and Aesthetix.

The high-end audio industry evolved and matured through the subsequent decades, as kitchen-table startups became establishment players. Companies that emerged during this period, such as Spectral Audio and the Jeff Rowland Design Group, invigorated the field with bold new thinking and nocompromise engineering. These marques, among others, are profiled in “The High End Matures.”

The zeal of audio engineers in Britain has also played a pivotal part in driving technological advances. From smaller-scale operations to multinational corporations, England’s unique contribution to high-end audio is well represented with our profiles of that country’s most influential electronics manufacturers.

We’ve also devoted sections to two apparently antithetical amplification technologies: singleended-triode and output-transformerless designs on the one hand, and switching amplifiers on the other. No approaches could be more divergent, yet each offers its own valid means of achieving superb sound.

In “Today’s Vanguard” we profile the younger generation of designers who will carry the torch well into the middle of this century. These upstarts may be armed with advanced engineering degrees and possess computer-based development tools, but they embody the same passion and ethos that drove luminaries such as Saul Marantz, Sidney Harman, Frank McIntosh, and William Zane Johnson to create their landmark products. That ethos—in which no measures are deemed too extreme in the pursuit of musical realism—is the thread that connects them all through the decades.

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McIntosh Laboratory B Y PA U L S E Y D O R

In the early years of home high fidelity—from, say, the mid-Fifties through the early Seventies— McIntosh and Marantz pretty much had the crèmede-la-crème electronics market to themselves. Indeed, it could be said that they practically defined it.

Saul Marantz divested himself of his company in the late Sixties to the Japanese, but McIntosh continued, and continues, to grow and prosper.

Asian companies eventually acquired it, too, but despite the changes in ownership, McIntosh itself was left fairly autonomous, its several owners realizing that its value lay in its heritage and identity.

That identity began to form in the late Forties when Frank McIntosh—a man with considerable experience in broadcasting and in designing professional sound systems, and also, like more than a few of the early audio pioneers, a musician (cellist)—started thinking about an amplifier capable of dramatically higher power and lower distortion than anything available at the time. He hired Gordon Gow as an assistant and between them they invented the “unity coupled circuit,” which is still in use today. The resulting 50W-1 amplifier demonstrated unprecedented performance in its day: 50 watts at less than one percent distortion, response flat to within 1dB from 10Hz–100kHz with less than 10-degrees of phase shift between 10Hz–30kHz. At five percent distortion—typical of good amplifiers of the time—the W-1 could have been rated at 80 watts.

By 1949, McIntosh had set up the company that soon became known as McIntosh Laboratory, with Gow as general manager and Maurice Painchaud as controller. Two years later, Sidney Corderman was hired and put in charge of research, engineering, and development. McIntosh himself—who was

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McIntosh Laboratory

Left: Gordon Gow and Frank McIntosh.

Top: Maurice Painchaud.

Bottom right: Sidney Corderman.

always called “Mr. Mac”—essentially left the running of the company to these three men. And so it remained until the deaths of Gow in 1989 and Mr. Mac himself in 1990. In 1951, the company moved from Maryland to Binghamton, New York, where more than six decades later it still remains.

Throughout its long, distinguished history McIntosh has brought out so many products of high excellence that it would be almost an insult to name a best (or even a handful of the best). Nevertheless, there are certain signature products that define the company’s overall character, its goals and values, and, of course, its style. In the Fifties, the C8 preamplifier, the C60 and MC30 amplifiers, and the MR55 tuner (unusual for the time, it featured AM as well as FM) set a performance standard that few other manufacturers could even aspire to, let alone meet. Its only serious competitor in what might be called the “blue chip” market was Marantz. If you could afford a product from one or the other, you bought it. If you couldn’t, you bought what your budget allowed and lusted after the Mac or Marantz of your dreams. One thing that distinguished all preamplifiers before the onslaught of minimalism in the mid-Seventies was that control units really should offer both control and controls. The C8 came with bass and treble, plus five-position knobs for rumble and loudness compensation, and ten slide switches labeled “Record Compensation” for pickups and phono equalization, which was far from standard in the days before the advent of the LP and the RIAA equalization curve.

Apart from the olde English font for the company name, what you don’t find in the McIntosh components from the Fifties is the famous, virtually iconic McIntosh look: the black glass faceplates, the imposing blue meters, the gleaming metal knobs, the rows and columns of knobs and buttons cleanly, logically laid out—a model of order and elegance. Initially the first black panels were Plexiglas and covered only part of the fascia; the rest were in brushed gold with stenciled lettering. But soon customers complained that the Plexiglas was prone to scratches, the stenciling came off easily from the

frequent touch of fingertips, and why couldn’t the whole fascia be glossy black, which looked way classier? Eventually the faceplates were made from glass with the stenciling on the inside, which required a special custom-made dye for the combination of lettering that appeared gold in a normally lighted room and glowed teal blue when the lights were dimmed. Thus was born the signature McIntosh style, which proved very complicated and expensive to manufacture. But it’s doubtful any McIntosh owner ever wished it away or regretted the extra money it cost. Part of the appeal—not to mention the prestige—of owning a McIntosh is that classic look, which, because it is classic, is and will be forever contemporary.

This look also translated into something else. McIntosh components were and are always physically large, heavy, rugged, and massive—obviously intended for serious business. Yet the image the company courted and built appears to have anticipated the lifestyle components of today, albeit on a grander and far more imposing scale. McIntosh took pride in ownership very seriously, and obviously intended its preamps and tuners to be not just displayed but proudly so. While there was nothing pretentious about them, owning them conferred upon the buyer a certain difficult-to-define but real sense of caché—they were very embodiment of class. The amps were initially industrial in appearance, yet once the blue meters and black glass panels were introduced, even they became too beautiful to hide: “Mac” components were in some respects the first “luxury” products of the audio industry, with a style that involved a distinctly “clubby” aesthetic, redolent of an English-style study or library. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, business executives, and celebrities were the obvious buyers, and it was easy to get the impression that the men—it was always men in those days—who owned McIntosh components also owned smoking jackets that were actually used for their intended purpose, a snifter of cognac to accompany the cigar or pipe full of tobacco, with Brubeck on the turntable or Mozart over the airwaves. Not too surprisingly, the company soon acquired a sizable list of celebrity clients, which included Harold Lloyd,

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McIntosh in its Own Words Sidney Corderman on the role of listening in product development: “McIntosh has always used a scientific, measurements-based approach. If a design doesn’t measure well, it isn’t going to sound good. If it measured well, we would move on to listen to evaluate the sound quality. That was where final judgments were made. There was a case when we first developed the MC60 power amplifier. We sent the first MC60 to Ewing Nunn, an individual who produced a small quantity of vinyl discs at his recording company. He had an excellent ear. He evaluated it and said it didn’t sound good. We had measured it and we knew the distortion was very low and the frequency response was very flat. We couldn’t understand why he didn’t like it. He sent it back and we studied it for quite a while.

Finally using a new test instrument—a wave analyzer—I was able to find that the ripple from the power supply was combining with signals going through the amplifier, making intermodulation products. There was 120Hz intermodulation on each side of fundamental frequencies. He was hearing it. We added a filter choke to the power supply that corrected the problem. We returned it to Ewing, and he loved it. And we were off and running with our new model.”

David O’Brien on the amplifier clinics: “A major positive benefit of the clinics was to demonstrate to both dealers and consumers that McIntosh electronics performed as advertised, while the majority of Brand X components did not. I knew from previous experience that McIntosh components performed as advertised. I also knew there were a lot of inflated claims by other manufacturers, but I had no idea of the magnitude of the situation. The greatest misinformation came from the biggest manufacturers, who did the most advertising in industry publications. Such revelations resulted in dramatic sales increases for McIntosh products…it was quite common for a McIntosh owner to place

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McIntosh Laboratory

a unit on my test bench with words something like, ‘Remember me? Last year I had a Brand X amplifier that didn’t perform well at your clinic, so I traded it for a McIntosh.’ This experience was repeated innumerable times over the years.”

Gordon Gow on the room: “The room becomes the fifth component. The input device, turntable, tape machine, preamplifier, power amplifier, and the loudspeakers—and now the room can affect both the sound character and the musical balance to a degree that can completely nullify the investment in really expensive equipment. To give an example: At home I have roughly about $10,000, maybe $12,000, of stereo equipment— the best loudspeakers we make, the best power amplifier, the best preamplifier, tuner, and a super-quality turntable, cartridge, and ’arm.

Without compensation for the room, that system will not even produce stereo. You cannot even hear stereo until you do an acoustical analysis of the room from each loudspeaker and compensate each loudspeaker. It required eight filters on each side in order to produce stereo, but, having set them up accurately and comprehensively, the degree of stereo imaging in both spaciousness and depth is about as good as I have ever heard. In fact, I might even brag that it is probably better than anything else I have ever heard.”

Charlie Randall on the Mac image: “We have very retro-looking cosmetics even though we have made big changes over time. But the customer who buys McIntosh wants McIntosh. Consistently, he always knows that he can go back and get another piece, two years later, ten years later, fifteen years later, and the system is going to match. You know, we never go from black to silver, or bronze, or whatever. There’s always the consistency in the system.”

The storied McIntosh factory in 1964.

Howard Hughes, all four Beatles, Brian Wilson, and the Grateful Dead. In 1969, the company’s amplifiers were used at the Woodstock festival, and in 1974, the Grateful Dead’s “Wall of Sound” at the San Francisco Cow Palace was powered by an epic 28,800 watts of McIntosh amplifier muscle. Savvy moviegoers know that whenever Hollywood wants to use a sound system to suggest a well-heeled character with lots of money, McIntosh is the go-to company, as the Matt Damon character’s system in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 The Departed amply demonstrates.

In the early Sixties, the company debuted what must be by any reckoning a pair of signature products: the MC275 stereo power amplifier (1961) and the C22 stereo preamplifier (1963). Although both were anticipated in look and function by the C20 preamp and the C240 amp of two years earlier, it was the later units that helped define the state of the art in electronics throughout most of the rest of the decade. The C22 was almost a dock brief of what the hub of a sophisticated system at the time was supposed to consist of: provision for two record players (manual and changer), two tuners (AM in addition to FM, since most serious tuners in those days, including Macs after the MR55, were FM only), two tape decks with full monitoring, MIC input, tape head, and AUX. (What was connected to that in those days? No domestic televisions made the audio outputs available.) In addition to tone controls, loudness compensation, and a full complement of scratch and rumble filters, there was a mode selector that included stereo, stereo reverse, mono to both channels, right to both channels, left to both channels, and full mono to one or the other channel (clearly system testing, balancing, and adjustment was a paramount concern back then).

If any single McIntosh product could lay claim to first place among equals, it would have to be the MC275 amplifier, authored by Sidney Corderman, by then a legend in the making himself. Based on the MC75 monoblock of a few years earlier, this unit generated 75 watts per channel, and twice that when the amp was run in mono mode (available at the flip of a switch). With its sloping chrome panel that housed input jacks, speaker terminals, and level controls, its chrome-plated base supporting the three transformers in one row, the four output tubes in another, and the six input tubes in a third, and the McIntosh name and model number proudly emblazoned in bas-relief along one side of the base, the MC275 is the most beloved of all McIntosh products. Its sound was notable even then for its neutrality and musical naturalness and authority.

It enjoyed a twelve-year run until 1973. As befits its high reputation, when

Top: McIntosh wound its own transformers in this dedicated area of the factory.

Bottom: Today’s McIntosh products retain the brand’s iconic black glass, green front-panel legends, and blue power-output meters.

McIntosh introduced a commemorative product in the mid-Nineties in honor of Gordon Gow, the MC275 was the chosen product, soon followed by the C22.

At the beginning of the Sixties, McIntosh took an unprecedented step in public relations and customer satisfaction: the famous amplifier clinics, whereby customers could bring their McIntosh amps or those of other manufacturers to local dealers around the country and have the performance verified by a sophisticated series of tests conducted by David O’Brien, hired expressly to run the clinics, which continued for thirty years. Those rare Macs found wanting were fixed or replaced free of charge (even defective tubes were replaced for free). (At one of these a young fellow brought his own home-brewed amp; when it didn’t test as he expected it to, he took it home, made some modifications, and brought it back to be re-tested. His name was Bob Carver, but that’s another story told elsewhere in this book.)

The Sixties began with the development of some of the finest tube products and ended with solid-state. This was true of McIntosh, as of Marantz, Harman Kardon, and most others. By 1973, McIntosh would stop manufacturing any tube gear. The C24 solid-state preamp appeared in 1964, followed three years later by no fewer than four power amplifiers. The first two, the MC250 and MC2105, were, interestingly, styled to resemble the chrome-bottomed openchassis designs of the MC240 and MC275. The second two, the MC2502 and MC2105, were the first to sport the famous McIntosh meters and the blackglass-front look. Only one of the company’s solid-state designs from these years ever attained classic status among hardcore audiophiles: The MR78 tuner, introduced in 1972, is the only FM tuner to be as highly prized as the legendary Marantz 10B, with an adjacent-channel selectivity measurement that trounced any tuner made up to that time.

When McIntosh ceased manufacturing tube units, it lost some of its prestige among hardcore audiophiles. The first issue of The Absolute Sound appeared in

McIntosh Laboratory

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Left: Building the MC240; this photo shows the scale of McIntosh’s production capability.

Top: MC2505 solid-state amp.

(Photos courtesy of McIntosh.)

1973, founded and edited by Harry Pearson, who made a distinction between “ordinary” high-fidelity components and those devoted to only the finest in sound reproduction, which he called the “high end.” It was a name that caught on and stuck. Before long, the tube revival would be in full swing with Audio Research Corporation and Conrad-Johnson in ascendance. Pearson referred to the Seventies and Eighties as the “dark days” of McIntosh, a review in TAS tarnishing the brand with the most condescending of judgments: McIntosh components were the ultimate in middle-brow audio, appealing to doctors and lawyers, in other words, those in it for the prestige, not the sound. Was there any sonic basis for these judgments?

Yes and no. No, in the sense that it’s seriously doubtful McIntosh’s solid-state amps and preamps were anything other than excellent, as the brisk market for any McIntosh gear readily testifies. (“I’d rather have an old McIntosh than a new anything else,” someone once said.) But yes in the sense that McIntosh’s solid-state amplifiers were certainly different from the rest. Mac’s engineers always regarded reliability as being co-equal with performance in importance.

What good is the best-sounding amplifier in the world if it’s constantly breaking down? The stability of transistors in those days was a serious worry, especially with power-hungry speakers of low-impedance loads. McIntosh’s transistor amplifiers employed, and still employ, autoformers—in effect, transformers— in the output stage to enable the amp to match speaker impedances better, to deliver power more efficiently, and to ensure stability. But when some transistor designers made a fetish of DC-to-speed-of-light-frequency response, any sort of transformer was considered a no-no (a curious prejudice, given their necessity with tube amplifiers), because a transformer would not pass a DC signal. This could have a subtle effect on very deep bass response, causing some phase shift, which might extract a small price in ultimate definition and perhaps extension.

Whatever, Mac’s solid-state amplifiers sounded different, one difference— ironically—being that they exhibited so little in the way of obvious audiophile characteristics (i.e., “detail,” “tight bass,” “crystalline highs,” etc.) and almost nothing of the typical transistor abrasiveness and harshness of the technology’s initial years.

Beyond that, there can be no question that the company had an image problem. The traditional styling didn’t help, the frank appeal to the more conservative and/or upscale market that could afford them, the fact that the products actually worked and weren’t subject to an endless series of quarterly modifications (thus supplying more news for the subjective journals and their more or less quarterly publication schedules), the emphasis upon measured performance as opposed to subjective evaluation. Regarding this last point, however, unlike, say, Peter Walker at Quad, the engineers at McIntosh actually did believe in listening evaluations once all the laboratory work was done and before a product was finally released (see “McIntosh in its own words”). But it hardly mattered: McIntosh survived

without the endorsement of the high end, and was perfectly happy to do so, moving quite successfully into multichannel, home theater, and digital.

But it’s very difficult for a company to lose its founders. When Gow died in 1989, Mr. Mac the next year, and Painchaud retired two years after that, it became clear that a change in direction was needed. The Japanese firm Clarion bought the company, and a few years later, D&M Holdings (for Denon and Marantz) bought it from Clarion. Ironically, it was the Japanese with their reverence for tradition who were initially responsible for the company’s decision to get back into production with tube amplifiers. In 1993, the MC275 was brought out in a limited edition of 4500 units in honor of Gordon Gow’s passing. Some inside the company were skeptical it would sell at all. It turned out the only reason the amps didn’t fly off the shelves is because they never made it to the shelves: The entire run was presold before any ever reached stores. Plainly a rapprochement between the company and the high end was in the making. In 1999, to commemorate the company’s fiftieth anniversary, Sidney Corderman designed the MC2000 Commemorative Edition, a 135-pound behemoth of a tube amplifier, 130 watts per channel, with a titanium-clad chassis and massive handles that resembled solid gold. Like the commemorative MC275, it also was issued in a limited run of 559 units and they, too, sold out fast. This led to the slightly smaller but still very imposing all-tube MC2102 stereo amp, rated 100 watts per channel, and the companion C2200 all-tube preamp, both products part of the standard lineup.

And in 2010, Harry Pearson gave the C2300 preamplifier a TAS Editor’s Choice award and a glowing (pun most definitely intended) review.

During these years McIntosh also scored several brilliant successes with solidstate technology: The C100 and later C200 preamplifiers were both sonically and technically state-of-the-art, while the MC402 amplifier registered with stunning purity, transparency, and power. Since then, both tube and solid-state have been living in happy coexistence within the McIntosh catalogue. In 2001, Charlie Randall, a McIntosh engineer who had joined the company as a student at the end of the Gow era, was made president. Randall’s embrace is large. He was part of Corderman’s design team for the memorial products, doing all the MC275’s circuit board layout and prototype building. He also possesses an engaging, outgoing personality that helped broker a new relationship between McIntosh and the high-end community, as well as the press and consumers, and he remains as committed to two-channel audio as to expanding McIntosh into the new century. In 2012, the Fine Sounds Group, an Italian firm that also owns Sonus faber, Audio Research, Wadia, and Sumiko, acquired McIntosh. Two years later the ownership of Fine Sounds shifted, and with Randall now the head of both McIntosh and Fine Sounds, the group has relocated its headquarters to the United States, which in turn means that ownership of McIntosh has come full circle back to North America.

The McIntosh brand has also come full circle in another sense: As diversified as its product range now is, the core offerings—preamplifiers and power amplifiers—that made the company great are once again as highly regarded by the audiophile community as they were at the very beginning more than sixty years ago. This is because throughout all the social, economic, and technological vicissitudes, McIntosh’s several owners, one and all, have remained steadfastly committed to the values that made it and continue to make it one of the most honored and respected names in high fidelity. Rarely has a cliché rung truer: The legend lives on.

McIntosh Laboratory

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