Brilliant Corners

There are things that make me feel so unpleasantly lightheaded that some days I worry my cranium might float away like a helium balloon. Like baby animals generated by AI that I can no longer distinguish from real ones. Skin care for tweens. Headlines about American politics that read like headlines about Turkmenistan. The music of Charli XCX.

And being middle aged. Even the term is a con. At 54, I'm not in the middle of anything, and given the way my back feels in the mornings, the thought of living to 108 fills me with terror. There are things about this stage of life that arrive imperceptibly, and not just the physical frailties. Chief among them is the way one's time on earth begins to feel unsettling and sometimes poignant in its suddenly tangible brevity. Now, when I speak to people in their early 20s, I find myself amazed by their belief that life is brimming with endless possibility and lasts nearly forever. I suppose I might envy them, but I remember being their age and wouldn't relish being that person again.

Fortunately, there's more to middle age than bewilderment at cottagecore and one's worsening nocturia. Personal highlights include being less appalled by my many shortcomings, knowing how to dress better, and giving way fewer f*cks about people's opinions. Also: Needing less sleep. Finding it easier to laugh at myself. And having more access to patience and, on occasion, kindness. Perhaps some readers can relate.

Like me, McIntosh amplifiers from the classic tube era occupy the category of old things that may still have something to offer. A few decades ago, I tagged along with a friend on a long drive upstate; he was going to pick up a restored McIntosh MC240. After we reached the audio shop, which had a whole slew of old Macs for sale, I bought an MC275 pretty much on a whim. I was beguiled by its chrome-and-black panache—it looked like Roy Orbison had turned into an amplifier—and reputation as a mafia-level luxury product of its time. If I'm being completely honest, a part of me enjoyed upstaging my friend by buying a bigger and more expensive amplifier. It wasn't my proudest moment.

Karma is real, and I ended up selling that MC275 a month later. Compared to my favorite amps, it sounded bassy, slowish, and opaque. In retrospect, I was probably pairing it with the wrong speakers, but the experience dampened my interest in vintage Macs.

For a while, anyway. Thing is, I'd never heard an MC225. Manufactured from 1961–1967, the smallest and lowest-powered of the stereo amplifiers has a reputation as the lineup's overachiever. In their treatise on vintage gear Audiomart's Walt Bender and Lennice Werth describe the MC225 as having "the nicest sound in a Mac stereo amp, ... light, airy, and the just-right balance of Mac richness." Ampsandsound's Justin Weber, who bases some of his tube amplifiers on classic mid–20th century circuits, also told me that the littlest stereo Mac was a favorite.

So when my friend Adam Wexler, a hi-fi retailer and vintage gear dealer who maintains a showroom here in Red Hook, mentioned that he had an MC225 in stock, I asked whether he could stand to be parted from it for a few months. For my purposes, the unit that Wexler lent me was perfect—restored with a light touch, with no more parts replacements than absolutely necessary and era-appropriate substitutions. Even the tubes appeared to be NOS originals: the 12AX7 and 12AU7s were smooth-plate Telefunkens, while the 12BH7s and 7591As were screen-printed with "McIntosh by RCA." In other words, the amp looked to be as close to stock as possible.

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Let's take a look around the spiffy chassis. Though it lacks the dictator-limo gravitas of the MC275, it's still a handsome, reassuring thing and no larger or heavier than it needs to be. There's a stereo-mono switch, which toggles operation between 25W in stereo and 50W in mono, and a gain pot for each channel, a feature I think should be installed on all power amps. This one came with the original screw terminals, though Wexler provided adapters that work with the bananas and spades on my double run of AudioQuest Thunderbird speaker cables. The python-like cables messed up the Mac's lovely wabi-sabi vibe, but nonetheless they sounded pretty terrific together. Oh, and there's no power switch: To turn on the MC225, you simply stick the tiny, ungrounded plug, the kind you might find on a bedside lamp, into an AC outlet. What more do you need?

I connected the Mac to the Manley Steelhead, which I used as a preamp both to decode LPs and to control volume, and sat down for a listen. I began with the rousing "Days in My Arms," from a Qobuz stream of Leave Another Day, last year's occultish dreampop opus by Milan W. On this album, Belgian musician and songwriter Milan Warmoeskerken sounds like Harry Potter—if after graduating from Hogwarts he got a job at an East London record store, discovered MDMA, and got heavy into My Bloody Valentine and Mazzy Star.

Through the Mac, the track sounded underwhelming. Unlike most modern amps, the MC225 didn't create a black silence behind the music, even with a digital source. In fact, the music's backdrop sounded decidedly more beige than black. Worse yet, this self-noise had an audible texture, putting a crimp in the Mac's sonic contrasts and transparency.

Compared to many of today's designs, vintage gear often excels at bringing out the tone colors of a recording. But on the Milan W. track, I had to admit that the Mac didn't sound as prismatically colorful as the single-ended–pentode Ampsandsound Mogwai SE I'd been listening to; it also came across as less saturated than the push-pull Manley Mahis. The MC225 wasn't grayish or bleached, but no one would confuse it with a musical rainbow generator like the Mogwai. And the amp's portrayal of pace and rhythm was no better than adequate.

Our acquaintance was off to an unpromising start, but I was determined to keep listening. After a while, I had to admit that the Mac's tonal balance was pretty well judged: It sounded just right, without any obvious emphases or omissions. The amplifier also extracted a respectable amount of detail, and it staged every bit as well as the other amps I had on hand, creating a soundfield that was wide, tall, and, when called for, deep. There was also that sense of richness Bender and Werth mentioned—not an upper-bass emphasis but a harmonic density and punchiness that made everything sound more real. Which brings me to the one sonic category in which the vintage Mac turned in a state-of-the-art performance: Musicians sounded so embodied and uncannily present in my room that on some tracks it felt downright spooky.

Last month, while digging through a box of 10" records at a local record emporium, I discovered a treasure: an original copy of Chet Baker Sings (Pacific Jazz PJLP-11) with its 1954 price tag still stuck to the cover. On my favorite version of "My Funny Valentine," the Mac made Baker's voice sound heart-stoppingly lifelike, and the amp's robust scale and dynamics rendered it larger than life both in terms of size and drama.

The listening session disproved certain jazz fans' conviction that Baker was little more than a pretty boy with a weak, inexpressive voice. By making his breath and rhythmic choices so palpable, the MC225 made it clear that Baker knew exactly what Larry Hart's lyric is about and had thought deeply about what he was singing. It also revealed that his voice possessed both range and volume but that he used it tastefully, with lyricism, restraint, and real subtlety.

In the coming days, as I listened to other records, I had to admit that I was experiencing something that was largely unrelated to the Mac's sound. Yes, the sound continued to be a decidedly mixed bag, and in certain respects unimpressive, but there I was, pulling out record after record. I hadn't heard some of them in years, a sure sign that something good was happening with the hi-fi.

After a while, I realized that while I remained aware of the Mac's sound, the 60-year-old amp kept me listening by continually shifting my attention to the music. I first noticed this while playing a mid-1970s Japanese copy of Blowin' the Blues Away (Blue Note GXK8036) by the classic lineup of the Horace Silver Quintet, with Junior Cook on tenor and Blue Mitchell on trumpet. I now own every title by this ensemble on vinyl, most in mono, and I continue to marvel at the inventiveness of Silver's compositions, the peerless interplay of the band, and the sheer listenability of the records, which I never tire of.

While taking in Blue Mitchell's solo on the album's title track, I was struck by the fire and freshness of his playing. Critics rarely included him in the top echelon of jazz trumpeters alongside Miles Davis, Freddy Hubbard, and Lee Morgan, but working in Silver's band brought out his originality and fine taste, and the solos he lays down on these classic sides are unfailingly delightful and always appropriate to the musical setting. This is possibly even truer of his bandmate Junior Cook. As I listened, the Mac allowed me to simply enjoy Mitchell's playing with all my pleasure centers engaged and to let go of the hyper-vigilant part of the mind that's always analyzing the sound.