McIntosh MX-121 - any thoughts? - Page 12

It sounds like Audyssey is completely out of the equation in mookie's scenario.

Hmmm... fixed Qs I can live with, but not fixed frequencies. The fact that there are 9 bands instead of 5 or 6 increases their odds of hitting the target, but it won't be golden.

This has me curious. I wasn't warm on Audyssey, and I'd assumed that the manual eqs were much more limited than they are (even if they're not ideal), so this week I'll see how much progress I make toward improving the sound. It's not bad, but there are 3 or 4 areas that could use subtle finesse.

I'm glad you posted.

The photo above is a representation of the frequency response of the 7005's front, center, surround and LFE channels. That's all it is. What does that have to do with the 121, or any other preamp for that matter?

Are you referring to something mentioned in the article?

The point is moot because, as one of those people who recently owned a 7005 and now owns a 121, I can verify that the two sound nothing alike. 7005 owners will continue to post links to charts and graphs and white sheets which they believe suggest that their 7005 is a brother of the McIntosh. It certainly is not. I couldn't get the 7005 out of my house fast enough -- the 121 is here to stay. That's quite a "real-world" discrepancy.

It's odd that you've read the entire article and the only comment worth typing is your own personal take on a graph (of all things). Understood. if proving your theory is that important, let's discuss.

The article you linked is from 2011, before the 121 was released. It's exclusively about the 7005. What 121 data am I missing within that article? I assume that you know better than to base your theory on a graph with a vertical resolution of +/- 1db, making some sort of judgment call about that device's sound based solely upon what is essentially a flat line. A line which would be shared with countless other preamps if analyzed at that resolution.

What other info is in the new article that we're not seeing? Anything relevant to your point? Better yet, since no one else has been able to mention the details, and since this is an MX121 thread (lest we get confused), can you summarize the author's opinion? Provide some quotes, or your own synopsis?

But please, not the whole 7005 vs. 121 thing again. Most of us are above it now.

Haha! Good point, mookie. I'm sure that not even Super Kal can see a graph and know what it would sound like. I've been engineering professionally for 20 years, and involved with electronics for much longer, and yet preamp graphs (with the exception of certain large and obvious curves) tell me practically nothing about the sound. Believe it or not, when I want to know what something sounds like I listen to it. Last week I was calibrating microphones with another engineer and we noticed ENORMOUS differences between them. One sounded plastic and distant whereas the other was utterly phenomenal. Looking at the two graphs, they were frighteningly similar. In fact, their "frequency response" was similar, but there's much, much more involved in the sound of a device than its ability to faithfully reproduce the proper decibel at the every frequency. We could have swept test tones across the entire spectrum and the volumes would have matched between the two mics, but record a singer with each and your jaw would drop. You can't "see" that, you have to listen.

I'm not suggesting that graphs are worthless, I'm suggesting that, for this, graphs are worthless.

Good point. The minimum increment is indeed 0.04, which you could call its resolution -- I was referring to the height of the Y axis so maybe I should have used the word "scope."

Either way, the largest deviation from the flat line hits at 20KHz (a frequency very few of us can hear) and it's a dip of only 0.2, an amount that none of our ears could detect.