McIntosh MC250

The McIntosh 250 shown below is the only solid state amp featured here on my hifi website. I guess you could say I’m not a solid state guy. But my experience with McIntosh’s 50’s and 60’s era tube amps made me curious about their first solid state amp. If they were satisfied with its sound while still producing top tier tube amps, maybe there was something to it.

So I began looking for a clean example of the MC250, McIntosh’s first foray into the new solid state amplification market of the mid 1960’s. This early generation of solid-state amplification is not a sound that many folks search out. My own preconceptions of this generation of gear was of poor sound, so my expectations for the MC250 were fairly low. Eventually I found what I was looking for in a meticulously restored unit from Solid State Audio out of New Orleans, Louisiana. And wow what a fine job these folks did! A ground up restoration, the amp arrived looking almost like something new out of the box from 1970. Plugging it in for the first time I didn’t quite know what to expect, but what I got was complete silence at idle and a startlingly live jump-out-of-your-socks sound that literally leaps out of the speaker. And it sounds unexpectedly, quite good.

McIntosh was a little late to the game in the solid-state race. They had been making some of the very best tube equipment on the market since the early 50’s, and they kept at it for a while even as the market changed around them. But by the mid 60’s they couldn't not have a solid-state product, and the MC250 was designed and finally released in March of 1967. There is some anecdotal evidence that the 250 was carefully voiced to sound like the 240, but who knows? At any rate the MC250 was a well-designed unit of the highest quality, like all McIntosh, and has certainly stood the test of time. With 7883 total units out on the wild from 12 years of production (1967 to 1979), 50 years on there are still plenty of them plugged in and playing music as you read this today. And probably not even sweating it.

On efficient drivers like the Zenith 49CZ852, the McIntosh 250 has a feeling like it is in orbit, easily doing anything the music requires, and there is a lightness and effortlessness that is truly impressive. Moving on to the living room and my big inefficient Bozak speakers, the 250 is perfectly at home. This might have been the amp that Rudy Bozak used to voice the B-305 speakers I have in the living room, and it shows. Compared to the 240, the 250 has a bit more muscly fiber. But gives up a bit of glide if that makes sense. I do prefer the 240 but could easily be happy with this.

One area where the 250 really shines is on electronic heavy music like Kraftwerk. The 250 has a different sound than the tube amps; its sharper and more insectile, more vividly present and projected than the tube amps seem to be able to deliver. This was the one striking difference for me from the 240, MC30’s or the 225. The 250 does produce a more visceral sound on some program material. A sports analogy: the 225 is like a basketball player, the 240 is a boxer, but the 250 is a hockey player; fast moving and heavy hitting.

Stick a tube on top of it and I’d probably vote it even higher. And this gets to my one real complaint. It’s boring. Not boring sounding, but look and functionality wise this is boring stuff. Its sits there like my microwave oven; doing nothing, showing nothing, being nothing. I can’t even tell its on. It doesn't really even get appreciably hot; its tough to tell by feel even after a full 12 hour day if the amp is on or not. And for good or bad, aesthetics and the raw feeling of “electricity!” is some part of my attraction to the tube amps. This doesn't scratch that itch in the slightest. And for what its worth, neither did the Pass Labs F7 amp I had years ago. That aside, there’s just not much to dislike about the 250’s sound. It's a great sounding amplifier and with 50 conservative watts of solid state power it can step up and play rough on pretty much any speaker ever made. Highly recommended as a low maintenance but very satisfying vintage audio solution.

The MC250 shares the now classic “lead-sled“ lines of this era of McIntosh. Minus the tubes of course. Aesthetically, a pair of top mounted can capacitors don't make up for the soft glow of 6L6 tubes.

The 250 features the same speaker terminal strip and basic layout as the other lead sleds. Dual gain controls allow matching to a preamp’s gain, or even use as a standalone unit.

To follow up on something I mentioned above: the description of the 250 on Kraftwerk (or electronic music in general) as “insectile”. This is a word I haven’t used to describe audio before, and it seems funny that it's a word I’ve apparently saved for a solid state amp. But I don't mean it as an insult, quite the opposite. If you've stood in the woods in the dim evening light and heard the masses of cicadas in the trees you can relate to what I’m getting at. The solid state MC250 seems to be able to create this sound, but the tube powered MC240 doesn't go there. It glosses over these finer, delicate, but pitchy structures.

Do I like the 250 better on this type of music? Maybe. Its more involving, more engrossing. But on something like Chet Baker or Diana Panton, the 240 is tops without even a real fight. My time with the 250 does lead me into some real puzzles. It's a lot better than I expected it to be, and overall its been enlightening to own this amplifier.