McIntosh has been making amplifiers for a long, long time since 1949 infact, when the company was first incorporated as McIntosh Engineering labatory and moved from Washington D.C to silver spings Maryland. However, the seeds were planted as far back as 1942 when Frank McIntosh started a small company consulting on radio station design and sound systems. He was not satisfied with the quality of the audio amplifiers around at the time, so he invented one that gave high power with low distortion. Then in 1946, McIntosh recruited Gordon Gow, who was young but a brilliant engineer, and was pivotal in making his dream real. What they came up with was called the McIntosh 50W1 Unity Coupled Amplifier. It delivered fifty watts of power with less than 1% distortion in the 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz range. So McIntosh, the company, arrived in the world with a bang.
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McIntosh Have always been a leader in the development of new technology, but perhaps the biggest leap forward in the industry came in 1967 when they produced the MC2505. It was the first of it's kind as a solid state power amplifier much of the developments still being made today can trace their routes to the MC2505, and the autoformers in the model at the time were a revolution.
18 years ago the company was bought out. It was also the year of Frank's death and some believed that it was also be the end of the company as it was known. However they were wrong, the innovation and high standards did not change. The company today is still much the same as in it's beginnings with some of the finest amplifiers anywhere and simlar designs to the originals.
McIntosh have always been wonderfully innovative in their designs through models such as the MC2102, MC200, MC602 and MC275. But with their wonderful performance and unreal sound the price tags are certainly worth it!
In most conventional tube amplifiers they take power only from the plates of the output tubes. In the McIntosh Amplifier circuit half the power it taken from the plates and half from the cathodes, drawing the power from both sides of the tub.
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So why can't McIntosh's competitors replicate the amplifiers? After all the patent ran out years before. Well, the output transformers are still woven at headquaters and these give McIntosh their incredible performance at extreme levels and can't be copied.
In 1962 McIntosh began what became probably one of the most successful as well as the longest running marketing campaigns in the Consumer Electronics industry known as 'The McIntosh Amplifier Clinic'. Whilst they believed that Mcintosh were "Still the Best" they needed to come up with a solution to prove that to the consumer. This was done by testing amplifiers in stores, with shoppers there to witness, so they could demonstrate just how high the quality was. David H. O'brien may be the most associated man with McIntosh outside of Gordon Gow and of course Frank Mcintosh. He tested huge numbers of amplifiers all over The US and Canada for almost 30 years. You can read all about his story in the "The McIntosh Amplfier Clinics".
Ok, the Amplifiers sound incredible and whilst no one could say they are cheap you can find some very good deals especially on the internet, just search around.
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