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RE: Ping Jim McShane & Michael Samra

Ben, hi. This is really Mike & Jim's forte but thought I'd add a bit about my McIntosh experience. I had purchased a 225 years ago. It sounded pretty darn good stock. I brought it up to date a bit and then moved on. I was headed into SET territory. At some point I decided to concentrate on it to see just exactly what the ingenius Unity Coupled Circuit sounded like. In went Stealth Diodes from Fairchild, Black Gate caps in the power supply, Teflon & tin TFT Rel and Polystyrene Multi RTX Rel caps. When finished it sounded better but not a sea change. I remember thinking "all that work and not the magic." Later I started measuring R values and found about 50% of the carbon comp R were way off spec. I don't know why I didn't do this earlier. I wound up changing each and every R with 1% or better carbon film or wire wound. Then I gave it a listen and almost fell off my chair. Wow! The amp had jumped into another sonic universe - a better one. All the good things I noticed when stock were there and a whole lot more that weren't. Imaging, shades of colors, clarity, aliveness, resolution and on and on. It proved to be one of the greatest shockeroos of my audio life. Clearly the MC-225 was now in a whole new league. I mention this because every component is important in an audio circuit. I knew that but it had slipped under the radar somehow. We can labor on what appears to be the crux of the problem at hand only to discover there is something of equal importance untended. Anyway, Happy Listening.


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  • RE: Ping Jim McShane & Michael Samra - elektron 06/2/0812:32:57 06/2/08 (0)

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