Advice on Making Audio Progress
In the late-90s I had tried to power various speakers I owned with Mac 30s. I could never actually get them to reproduce music faithfully, but they did wonderful things for some recordings.
In 2005, long after I had moved on from the Macs, I found a low-power integrated transistor amp from the 70s that was vastly superior to the custom tube preamp and amp we were using for shootouts at the time.
It was, simply put, much more musically truthful. It sounded more like live music and less like recorded music.
It is this quality that is hardest to find in all of audio.
It is also the one quality of our system that, more than any other, makes it possible to do the kind of work we do.
Our equipment (along with our room treatments, setup, electricity and such) lets us hear the naked sound of the record being played, uncolored and unadorned.
Back to Mac
They started building them in 1954. Steve Hoffman was a big fan. We spent a fair amount of our time together tube-rolling back in the late-90s. Based on some of the recent interviews I’ve read, he appears to still be enamored with their sound.
Like the fellow who bought his first boat, buying a pair of Mac 30s was the second best day of my life, exceeded only by the day I got rid of them.
Regardless of what they might have said in their ads, they were not 99.60% perfect by any stretch of the imagination. To this day I consider them to be the most colored and inaccurate — albeit perhaps the most Tubey Magical — amp I have ever heard in my life. Having been actively involved in this hobby for more than fifty years, I regret to say that I’ve heard plenty of amps that didn’t do their jobs right.