How good is the McIntosh MC-2300 vs modern SS amplifiers?

You must a another Mac on the way as your "nesting" again!
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Cheers George

I rest my case.

I was hoping someone would compare the fine engineering of this amplifier compared to what Phase Linear, Crown, Quatre and otheres were doing at the time. 

Auto transformers made this design extremely relaible. Ive never been a Mac Man but I have to appreciate good design when I see it. I don't like everything they build and I have worked on much of it. Their preamps have too many buttons in the signal path. But if kept clean they are not a problem.

I just wanted to share my discovery with others who might also appreciate it. In an earlier thread there were posts that called the autotransformer a bandaid for a poor design. It is the essence of this design. Anyone who understands safe operating area of transistors will appreciat this. Most amplifiers that fail are due to engineers who do not. Mac knew.

How an amplifier sounds is subjective and may depend as much as someones mood, their perception of value and cost and build. 

George, I respect your posts here. However you are comparing the Gryphon on Wilsons to the Mac on what speaker? How many years between the comparisons? How many years between the amplifier designs...50 Years!

Do readers here know that almost all modern SS amps are a basic op-amp circuit done over and over again with fancier metal, more capacitors, where are we going with this?

They were probably good in their day, Roger, but so were many others. But you would have them today as your main amp I think not.
A solid state amp that has trouble driving a certain speaker load, can be helped with the use of an autoformer, I say save your money and get the right amp instead.

All you have to do to prove it to yourself, is put a pair of Autoformers on ANY decent solid state amp that can drive hard loads, and hear what it does to the sound compared to when used without them, even on easy loads.

All this fishing Roger, sounds to me like you may be ready to venture into solid state using output transformers?
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Cheers George

@georgehifi - sorry to say Roger won't be going down that path. He's just a curious guy that does a lot of research. When he heard Curl talk about the 2300's it got the better of his curiosity, especially given their use by the Grateful Dead with the Wall of Sound set up. So he looked into it and thought he would write about some of his thoughts and findings. If Roger was going down the path of building solid state amps, and he has built at least one I know of in the past, I'd be one of the first to hear about it.