Mcintosh c2200 schematic

“I

t took long
enough,” as I

said to Larry
Fish and Roger Stock­holm.

McIntosh Labora-

tory

1

has waited nearly
40 years to introduce
its first totally new
tube preamp since the
C22, which was in
production from 1963
to 1972. I was in col­lege in 1963—more
or less penniless, drool­ing over Mac gear in the windows of a
shop in Providence, Rhode Island.
Better graduate. Get a job. Make some
dough. Buy some Mac tube gear.

Oops. Too late.

By the time I could afford new Mac
tube gear, in the mid-’70s, Mac was
making only solid-state. I could have
bought used. Probably should have.
Everyone then, though, was saying hal­leluiah, good-bye tubes, good-bye trou­ble, hello solid-state. Len Feldman,
Julian Hirsch —even our own guru,
J. Gordon Holt. You don’t argue with
the experts, right?

I have long lusted after McIntosh tube
gear, so I was delighted when, in the early
1990s, McIntosh revived their MC275
power amp —the very amp I wanted to
own back in my college days—and
then, several years later, the C22 pre­amp. These were reissues—close, if
not exact, replicas of the originals. I
never did try the C22 reissue, but the
MC275 Commemorative remains a
staple of my collection.

For the company’s 50th anniversary, in
1999, McIntosh commissioned Sidney
Corderman (who engineered the origi­nal and reissue of the MC275) to design
the MC2000 Commemorative power
amp. The amp was about a year late and
went for $15,000. The MC2102 power
amp followed, for a mere $6000—also
designed by Mr. Corderman.

Now, of course, McIntosh dealers
and customers wanted a tube preamp.

Hence the $4500 C2200, meant to be
matched with the MC2102 or the
MC2000. (For MC2000 owners, a spe­cial edition of the C2200, with gold­plated endcaps and knobs, is available.)

“The C2200 is currently our best­selling preamp,” Larry Fish told me.
You’ve met Larry before. He’s
McIntosh’s vice president of product
planning.

“Selling more briskly than solid-state,
eh?”

I had to rub it in. Larry is so solidly
solid-state.

“We can’t make them fast enough.
We’re back-ordered.”

I had a very hearty laugh.

“I knew you’d find that amusing,”
Larry said.

“Almost as amusing as the fact that
Roger Stockholm was project engineer
for the C2200.” If anything, Roger is
even more solidly solid-state than Larry.
Or was.

Roger’s official title is senior elec­tronic design engineer. He joined Mc­Intosh 31 years ago, just as the last of

the original C22s was
going out of produc­tion. Naturally, he
started designing solid­state products. Roger
has been project engi­neer for almost every
McIntosh preamp
since the C32, in the
late 1970s. Until the
C2200, he’d never
touched tubes.

The company
teamed Roger up with
the legendary Sidney

Corderman, Mac’s Mr. Tube. For the
C2200, Sidney engineered the tube
circuits and Roger worked on the rest.

“It was a collaborative effort,” Roger
told me, involving Larry Fish and
Chris Bomba, McIntosh’s senior soft­ware engineer.

“Has Sidney turned you into a tube
believer?” I asked Roger.

“I’ve come around a bit,” he admit­ted. Hesitantly.

“If I had predicted five years ago that
you, Jolly Roger, would be project
engineer for a new McIntosh tube amp
for the 21st century, what would you
have said?”

“I’d have said you were crazy.”

I first met Roger three years ago,
when he and Larry delivered a
McIntosh C42 preamp for me to audi­tion with the MC2000. Poor Roger. He
was so proud of his preamp, which was
quite nice and remains in production,
but all I had eyes for was the tube amp.
(By the way, Roger and Larry are new
hires compared to Sidney, who has been
with McIntosh Laboratory since its
founding, in 1949.)

The C2200 retails for $4500, and I find
it hard to imagine that any McIntosh
enthusiast wouldn’t want to own one —
even fans of Mac’s solid-state amps.

Tubes aren’t as troublesome as they’re
sometimes made out to be —especially
the small ones typically used in pre­amps. (The C2200 uses four 12AX7
and four 12AT7 tubes.) Such tubes can
last for a decade or more, and are easy
and inexpensive to replace. They don’t
give off anywhere near the heat of, say,
a KT88 or 6550 output tube.

Stereophile, May 2002

McIntosh C2200 tube preamplifier

1 McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., 2 Chambers Street,
Binghamton, NY 13903. Tel: [phone]. Fax:
[phone]. Web: www.mcintoshlabs.com.

For the McIntosh C2200,

Sidney Corderman

engineered the tube

circuits and

Roger Stockholm

worked on the rest.

Electronically Reprinted from May 2002

Sam’s Space

Sam Tellig

The C2200’s front panel measures

17" wide by 7

1

⁄8" high, and the preamp
is 14" deep and weighs 26.75 lbs. The
high-level (or line-level) circuitry uses
two 12AX7A tubes and two 12AT7A
tubes. Ditto for the moving-magnet
phono stage: two 12AX7As, two
12AT7As. The phono tubes come on
only when you select the phono input.
If you don’t use the phono input, you
won’t be burning tubes for naught.

Because the C2200 is a Mac prod­uct, there’s every user-friendly feature
you could dream of, as well as features
you couldn’t dream of but might actu­ally use. The MM phono stage is stan­dard — you don’t pay extra. There’s a
Mono switch. There are Bass and
Treble tone controls.

I asked Roger and Larry who’s buy­ing the C2200.

Not just tube-amp customers, it turns
out, but owners of Mac solid-state
amps, too. Roger Stockholm, erstwhile
solid-state stalwart, explained:

“You can get your tube sound in the
preamp and then you can have bang for
the buck with a solid-state power amp.”

“Tube sound? So there is a tube
sound?”

“Larry warned me I was in for a ter­rible ribbing.”

Roger has come around…a little.

The C2200 has a busy rear panel.
There are six pair of outputs —three
balanced, three unbalanced. Mac
knows many of its customers are into
multiroom installations, so the C2200
can be configured to control a second
power amp in a nearby room. The extra
outputs might be useful for devices
such as powered subwoofers, too. You
won’t go wanting.

There are four pairs of balanced
(XLR) line-level inputs and six unbal­anced (RCA) line-level inputs. And if
you reconfigure the phono stage to be
line-level, you’ve got seven available
RCA line-level inputs.

The C2200 is not fully balanced from
input to output. Not that this matters
much, because the preamp is so quiet.
Larry recommends using balanced con­nectors with long cable runs—say, from
your preamp to power amp. Any noise
the cables will pick up will be nixed by
common-mode rejection.

The phono input can be reconfigured
by the user to serve as an additional line­level input. There’s a headphone jack,
using an ICE buffer that lowers the high
impedance of the line-stage tubes.
There’s full remote control. And you
can trim the inputs so the line levels
match in loudness.

At first glance, a visiting manufactur-

er of tube gear mistook the C2200 for a
power amp. That’s easy to do —there
are twin McIntosh “blue-eye” power­level meters. The C2200 sports the
familiar Mac glass faceplate. Labels for
the various control functions are illumi­nated in white on black. A digital read­out displays the input selected. Few pre­amps look so sexy in the dark.

But…power-level meters?

Customers want them, said Larry
Fish. “We made them useful,” he has­tened to add. “The meters are calibrated
so that ‘0’ represents full output at 2.5V.
If your power amp’s input sensitivity is

2.5V, then a ‘0’ reading on the preamp’s
meters will represent the amplifier’s
maximum rated power.”

“But do you really need the meters?”

“Well, on some McIntosh amps you
don’t have meters. Your MC275, for in­stance.”

I can see other uses for the meters —
to check the channel separation and
channel balance of your phono car­tridge, for instance. You can dim the
meter lights or turn them off complete­ly, if you like. You can also dim the dig­ital display.

I installed the C2200 in my main sys­tem, whose AR ES-1 turntable with
SME309 tonearm and Shure Ultra 500
moving-magnet cartridge were perfect
for the C2200’s MM phono stage. For
digital, I used a Rega Jupiter CD player as
transport with the Musical Fidelity A3

24

upsampling DAC. Speakers throughout
my listening were my reference Quad
ESL-989 electrostatics.

I usually have trouble writing about
preamps. Some designs — especially less
expensive ones—have a tendency to in­trude. If they’re tube, they might be
noisy. If they’re transistor, they might
impart a metallic haze. I’ve been big on
passive preamps, especially for audio­philes on a tight budget.

Surprise, surprise —the C2200 was
so quiet I thought I was listening to my
Purest Sound Systems 500 dual-mono
passive unit. I heard no noise at all
through the line-level inputs, even with
the volume cranked way up. (Of course,

I heard some noise when I selected the
phono input, but not much.)

Larry explained the C2200’s silence:
It’s the microprocessor-controlled
post-attenuator stage. He believes that
the C2200 is the only tube preamp
that has one.

“Under normal listening levels, the
C2200 is essentially a straight wire. The
post-attenuator is working full blast and
you’re listening at 12dB down from full
gain. If you need more gain to blast the
house apart, then turn up the volume
and the post-attenuator starts being
gradually removed. This allows you to
get high volume out of the preamplifier,
if you need it, but low noise under nor­mal listening conditions. By reducing
gain, the post-attenuator reduces noise.
That’s what makes the C2200 so quiet.”

Larry paused.

“You’re an old-timer, Sam…’’

“Gee, thanks.”

“Well, you’re probably old enough to
remember preamps that had output
attenuators. There were individual vol­ume controls for left and right channels
and then a master volume control. The
master control set the overall gain of the
preamp, and it was used to add gain
only if necessary. In the C2200, a micro­processor does this automatically and
you don’t have to think about it. As you
turn down the volume control, the
microprocessor reduces gain.”

The digital display reads from 0 to
100, but there are actually 214 volume­control steps. “You can set the volume
in half-dB steps.” From your easy chair,
of course. If you turn the volume up or
down very slightly, it might not show on
the display.

“A lot of thought went into the vol­ume control,” said Roger. “We used to
have a certain taper that we used for our
mechanical volume controls. As we
introduced electronic volume controls,
we made the action linear through a
long range. But there wasn’t much
action at the lower end. Linear all the
way through wasn’t really desirable, so
we changed the way it works. That’s the
beauty of software: we build in the taper,
or curve. The C2200 basically duplicates
the old mechanical volume control.”

“That’s right,” added Larry. “The
volume-control curve was developed
over the years to come on very quickly.
What we did was replicate the mechan­ical action with software so that the
same rotation gives you the same result.
For instance, if you go to the three
o’clock position on the C2200’s front
panel, the volume will be as loud as it
would with a mechanical control.”

Stereophile, May 2002

Sam’s Space

At first glance,

a visiting manufacturer

mistook the C2200

for a power amp.

“The advantage of the software is
we are able to maintain the half-dB
resolution,” Roger pointed out. “This
would be impossible with a mechani­cal control.”

As I said, the C2200 sounded quiet —
almost as if it weren’t there. Compared
to my Purest 500 passive preamp, the
C2200 imparted more oomph, more
body to the sound. Yet at no time did
the Mac seem to color the sound —to
roll off the highs, for instance, or fatten
the bass. It did not add extra warmth.
The C2200 seemed neutral without

being clinical. Another thing: the
C2200 did not impart any tube glare, a
problem with some tube preamps I’ve
heard over the years. It did not overly
brighten the sound.

I went back to the Purest 500, using
the Rega Jupiter CD player into the
Musical Fidelity A3

24

DAC. I felt that
the C2200 enhanced the presentation,
giving the sound more body, as I said,
and taking off some of the otherwise
transistory edge. In a well-designed
preamp, tubes tend to be harmon­ically restorative.

Roger had said that I could get my
tube sound from the C2200 and bang
for my buck from solid-state. That’s true
to some extent, and maybe more so
with McIntosh gear than with other
brands. Mac solid-state power amps,
after all, have transformer-coupled out­put stages: they’re built like tube amps.

There was certainly no penalty in
terms of noise.

“Our goal was to make a tube pre­amp and have it be as good as solid­state,” Roger told me. What’s actually
happened, I think, is that McIntosh has
made a tube preamp that exceeds what,
for $4500, would have been possible in
a solid-state design. But I couldn’t get
Roger or Larry to admit that.

“In the past,” said Roger, “there have
been problems with a tube preamp
hooked up to a transistor power amp.
You had to turn on your preamp, wait
for it to warm up, and then turn on your
transistor amplifier. Your amplifier was
ready to go before your preamp was.”

In the C2200, a delay circuit mutes
the preamp for about 30 seconds, dur­ing which “

TUBE WARMUP” appears

reassuringly in the digital display.

Larry Fish: “Electromagnetic switch­ing has a good deal to do with the fact
there are no clicks and pops. All switch­ing capabilities of the preamplifier are
electromagnetic. This is far more reli­able than the usual mechanical switch­ing because the switches themselves are
in an inert atmosphere.”

“Almost like a vacuum tube?”

“Not quite. The switches are in a glass
chamber filled with nitrogen. Wires are
suspended in the chamber, and the elec­tromagnetic field brings the two wires
together for contact.”

“Electromagnetic switching is super­reliable,” Roger added, noting that if a
switch is going to fail, it usually does so
right away — on the bench, at the fac­tory, before it gets out into the field.
McIntosh pioneered the use of electro­magnetic switching nearly 20 years ago,
Larry told me.

The C2200’s line-stage performance
was superb. I couldn’t ask for more. But
what of the phono stage?

Less than stellar.

Though it’s nice to know it’s there,
many C2200 owners will have no need
of a phono stage; it probably made no
sense for McIntosh to pull out all the
stops and provide exceptional phono
performance. As it was, I thought the
C2200’s phono performance was very
good —quite acceptable, in fact. Just
not stellar.

I’ll put things in perspective: You
could pay $4500 for a line-level preamp,
not get any phono stage at all, and have
nowhere near the convenience features
offered by the McIntosh C2200. You
could pay $4500 or more for a phono
stage alone. What the C2200 offers for
“free” is not at all bad.

But, using my Shure Ultra 500 in the
SME 309 arm on an AR ES-1 turntable,
I preferred the sound of my long-term
reference, the AcousTech PH-1 phono
stage, available for $1200 directly from
Acoustic Sounds. I heard tighter, better­defined bass. The C2200’s phono stage
sounded slightly muddy by comparison.
I heard better definition and detail over­all, a more natural, more spacious pre­sentation of, er, space. More “there”
there, in other words.

A lot might depend on your phono
needs. If LPs are a secondary, occasional
source, then the C2200’s phono stage
might be all you need. The sound was
full-bodied and dynamic. But compared
with the AcousTech, the C2200’s

onboard phono stage seemed to accen­tuate surface noise. The grooves seemed
quieter with the AcousTech.

Remember, if you don’t use the
C2200’s phono stage, the four tubes in
the phono section won’t turn on. And if
you reconfigure the phono section as an
additional line-level input, they’ll never
turn on. You could easily add an out­board phono preamp and let the on­board phono section lie dormant.

The C2200’s phono stage provides
40dB of gain. The phono sensitivity is
given as 4.4mV for 2.5V output at 1kHz.
In addition to moving-magnet cartridges,
you can probably use most medium- to
high-output moving-coils. Using the
additional gain available from the line
stage, you might even get by with a low­output (maybe below 1mV) MC. But
you’d probably have to put up with some
noise. Of course, you could always use a
step-up transformer.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure I ever heard
the outboard AcousTech phono stage
sound better, which is a tribute to the
C2200’s line-stage quality.

I found using this preamplifier a pure
pleasure. I welcomed the Bass and
Treble controls, which offer 12dB of
boost or cut at 30Hz and 10kHz, respec­tively. The tone controls are effectively
out of the circuit at the center detente
position. There’s also a Tone Bypass but­ton. There’s a practical reason for this
switch, says Larry. “You can put in some
bass boost, for instance, and A/B back
and forth between Tone Bypass to see if
the boost is what you want.”

There’s also a feature that, as far as I
know, is unique to McIntosh: A pro­grammable feature called Autotone can
memorize whether you want the tone
controls on or off for each output. Auto­tone even remembers the bass and tre­ble settings for the particular input.
Need some treble cut with CDs or
DVDs? Some bass cut with LPs? No
problem. I’m not sure I’d ever use
Autotone, but who knows?

I probably wouldn’t use Pass Through,
either, but I can imagine some audio­philes doing so—especially those who
want to enjoy their audiophile two­channel purity and their surround-sound
home theater, too. You engage Pass
Through by programming this mode as
one of your inputs. The C2200 then
passes the left and right channels to your
left and right front speakers. In other
words, your surround-sound processor
will control volume, source selection, etc.

Other features include the ability to
drive multiple power amplifiers. You
can have the C2200 control the main

If LPs are a secondary,

occasional source,

then the C2200’s

phono stage might

be all you need.

power amp in your listening room, for
instance, and a separate amp in a room
nearby, as explained in the owner’s
manual (downloadable as a pdf file from
www.mcintoshlabs.com). Better yet,
have your dealer demonstrate.

I loved many of the C2200’s conven-

ience features. When you run a power-

control cable from the C2200 to your
Mac power amp, you can have the pre­amp turn the power amp on and off.
Nice for lazy folks like me. You can also
have your preamp turn on your Mac
CD player and/or tuner. The same
remote control that controls your
C2200 can control your Mac CD play­er and tuner. McIntosh customers do
like their comforts.

Don’t let this panoply of features

put you off. I found that they never
intruded —they were there if I need­ed them, but weren’t in my way if I
didn’t. A preamp, especially, should be
about convenience, no? It’s a control
center, after all. Once I had everything
hooked up, I found the C2200 easy
and intuitive to use.

The McIntosh C2200 was one of

the finest line-stage preamps I have

ever used, and far and away the most
user-friendly in terms of features. I
don’t think you’ll find a better tubed
line-stage for $4500 — the C2200
merits a Class A recommendation for
this reason alone. As for LPs, the
C2200’s onboard phono section may
be all you need. It wouldn’t be fair to
deny the unit as a whole a Class A rat­ing because McIntosh has included
this more-than-acceptable phono
stage for “free.”

“I’d put this preamp in my own sys­tem,” said Roger Stockholm with pride.

So would I. In fact, I plan on keeping
the review sample to use with my
MC2102 tube amp. This new McIntosh
tube preamp was well worth the wait of
nearly 40 years.

And yes, I had been waiting all that
time.

s

The McIntosh C2200

was one of the finest

line-stage preamps

I have ever used and

the most user-friendly

in terms of features.

McIntosh Laboratory, Inc.

2 Chambers Street, Binghamton, NY 13903-2699

607-723-3512 / 800-538-6576

www.mcintoshlabs.com

For The Consumer's Protection: In order to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction, “new” McIntosh
products can be purchased only over-the-counter or delivered and installed by an Authorized McIntosh Dealer.
McIntosh products that are purchased over the Internet, by phone or mail order are presumed to be “used” and
do not qualify for any McIntosh Warranty. McIntosh does not warrant, in any way, products that are purchased
from anyone who is not an Authorized Dealer or that have had their serial number altered or defaced.

Posted with permission from the May 2002 issue of Stereophile ®

Copyright 2002, PRIMEDIA Inc. All rights reserved.

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