McIntosh MX-121 - any thoughts?

I have not heard anymore than you have I am sure. Kind of pricey for a processor, but obviously it looks nice next to their amps

I can understand a McIntosh amp owner with the cash being interested.

I wonder if they outsourced a lot of the work. That's a lot of complex functionality for a small company to manage. Are they affiliated with a larger company?

Has there been any mention of any room correction system?

There was some discussion here (http://www.audioaficionado.org/mcint...s-mx121-2.html)

McIntosh is one of the brands owned by D&M Holdings, who also have Denon and Marantz.

I'd venture a guess that McIntosh will use their room correction suite "Room Perfect", which seemed to do a good job when Kal reviewed it in the MX-150. Of course, that is just a WAG on my part.

Thanks, I thought Mc was part of D&M, but did not want to sound dumb by assuming I remembered correctly.

Dont bet the farm that Mcintosh will keep the MX121 up to date with timely updates!!

Who knows, next year they'll re-introduce another processor at half the price of the MX121 to burn those owners that bought one!

Wouldn't be surprised if it's quite similar to the Marantz part under the skin. Maybe the same boards, but strung together in Binghamton rather than some Chinese village.

The multichannel amp they released also looks a bit cheesy. At that price, if they want to digitize the meters they should have a Retina display for each meter, not a few cheesy LEDs arrayed in a fan.

I know I would pay a lot of money for a modern, efficient (that is to say, Class D) amp with hi-rez virtual LCD/OLED "meters" and ~250W/7ch/8Ω. The electronics are just commodity parts, but I like the McIntosh look.

MX-121 is supposed to have Audyssey and not use Lyngdorf system used in the MX-150.

If you don't need 7 channels, then going to the MC205 (5-ch) is the same price as the new amp.

So, you can get the meters and spend half as much on the pre if it is more in your price range.

B.

+1.

Their processors aren't anything revolutionary; they're very nice, but they're still drawing from the same pool of commodity parts as everyone else (like Denon and Marantz are, like Harman is, etc). This isn't to say "don't" - if you like the look and have matching components, it's a very appealing option ("all McIntosh" rooms are very imposing, visually, the $100,000 price-tag might be a bit rough for some people to swallow though). That said, you can easily spend less for the same.

It's your own choice, but I wouldn't get too hung up on the "they're obsessed with heritage and this and that" blah blah - they're a business and their goal is to make money.

Ignoring that your description will mean nothing (that dog don't hunt), can we cut the brand-worship out?

You claim that McIntosh "isn't the type" and that they "care" - got any proof to substantiate this? You're the one making the claim after all.

Maybe just post a picture of the inside and we can all see what the part/build quality looks like.

No reason to guess either way. Since D&M&Mc are under the same umbrella that offers the ability to get better deals on part quantity. That should help reduce the price, nothing more...

B.

From what I have been told the only thing Denon/Marantz about the MX121 is the HDMI chip set. The rest is McIntosh. It will use the Audyssey room correction rather than the Lindorff room correction. It will be a 7-channel processor

One thing that would be critical for me is to have balanced outputs on all seven channels to run to the amplifiers.

I sure don't want any unbalanced cables over 4 feet long running to an amplifier, which I would want to have located near the speakers.

That is one nice feature of the Marantz AV7500, but I would assume that a McIntosh unit would also have them.

Too bad Audio Research doesn't make one yet; made in Minnesota...ay-yup.

It will have a pair of balanced inputs and a full set of balanced outputs for each channel.

It will have two HDMI outputs, and will have the AirPlay feature onboard.

Looking at the cut sheet Mac sent me last month

See below.

It looks like from rear panel hookup posted that this unit is 7.2 which is two subwoofer output. That is fantastic because it really takes two subwoofers for right and left channels to dial in the room correction to sound properly especially for dedicated audio listening. From what I understand that the analog secton of this piece is all discrete electronics like their dedicated preamplifier line. These two factors are critical to me because it will serve as a center hub of my system that is all ultra high end audiophile components that I use as home theater and critical audio listening in stereo or multi-channel mode. Also, it looks like all the input and output features that i want seems to be convered with rear panel layout. So I think I will hold off upgrading my Krell HTS 7.1 to the Cary Cinema 12 now which is an excellent piece but is 7.1. Just wondering when MX121 will become available.

Looks fairly similar to the AV7005 from the back. The individual blocks are in different places, but labeling and layout is identical within blocks. Few features don't overlap, obviously, but still, looks very similar.

I hope the analog preamp is as good as my MX-119's.

Do we know if you can bypass Audyssey?

I believe the MX-150 moves the analog inputs to digital and then runs them through Lyngdorf.

That is what a rational company would do with commodity parts like A/V equipment, yes. And I suspect there will be more of that at DRM as time progresses.

However, given the picture Prof. Rubinson posted it seems that at the very least the layout is different.

There's no real advantage to be had by "going it alone." Except perhaps in loudspeakers, because there we're no longer talking about commodity electronic parts. I would love to hear the current McIntosh speakers with their arrays of black-domed Aura Whispers. That's a fantastic little driver.


I assume such "listening" was not properly even level-matched, let alone blind.

The Mac also has a useful roomEQ.

AFAIK, every product with Audyssey has the ability to bypass it.

I'm surprised it only has MultEQ XT on board, though. No mention of Pro calibration, either, but perhaps at this level it is assumed someone will come over and use the professional version to get the most out of the software.

MultEQ XT is useful, yes. But lots of parts today ship with XT32 at much lower prices, and of course in that range there are the Anthem and Anthem Statement parts with their arguably even better room correction software.

Really, in a released-in-2012 $6000 part, not having the current flagship version of Audyssey's room correction software is a puzzling shortcoming.

Perhaps it has the DSP horsepower required for XT32, and updating it to 2012-worthy spec is a firmware update away. Or there was simply an error in the spec sheet.


And, from what you subsequently posted, my assumption was entirely correct. Thank you.

According to your own words, you did not attempt any sort of controls (blind listening is best, but precise level matching is absolutely required to make valid comparisons between parts) that would make "listening with [your] reference albums and judging with [your] ears" anything but a waste of your time. Your "explanation" pointedly did not mention sticking a multimeter in the output ports of both parts to ensure that they were matched to under known just-noticeable-difference (JND) thresholds across the band.

Being an "audio engineer by trade" is, of course, entirely irrelevant. Though one would perhaps expect an "audio engineer" to understand basic concepts such as listener bias and the effect of small level differences on perception of sonics...

Now, if you are really talking about the Krell with no EQ (I assume it's it's too primitive, oops I mean "purist," to have such things) compared to the Marantz after running Audyssey, then what you heard is actually just probably rather large frequency response differences. The McIntosh will be no better than the Marantz in that case, because they run the same version of Audyssey.

I have read that the mac 121 does have XT32. Is that not correct??