I recently purchased an MA252 for my home. It is my first McIntosh, a company whose products I have admired for years but always considered out of my price range. For the last 15 or so years I have had a pair of Mirage M1 speakers and have paired them with several different amps with good results. Originally I ran two Bryston 4Bs with a Bryston preamp, that was al little too much power in the peaks and I wound up removing my tweeters and sending them to Canada to be rebuilt. After reinstalling them I sold one of the amps and that set up stayed with me for quite a while. I do love the Bryston equipment, you get a lot of value per dollar spent with Bryston, the phrase "built like a tank" comes to mind. When one channel quit on my remaining 4b I purchased a Son of Ampzilla 2 after reading a lot of glowing reviews . It always seemed to be straining to run the M1s, I was not impressed AT ALL with this amplifier. Somewhere in that time period my Bryston preamp bit the dust and I purchased a Lexicon MC8 and used the bypass mode which effectively gave me an analog preamp.
I started looking into going in a different direction as far as huge power-hungry speakers and expensive power- producing amps. My wife always thought the M1s were "too damn big" so that influenced my directional change quite a bit. Anyway, I read about the MA252, it looked like the old Mc275 which I had always loved, went to audition one and fell in love. The owner of the store had it paired with GoldenEar Technology Triton 1 speakers and it was a magical combination. The Tritons have on-board 1600 watt amplifiers and that greatly reduces their need for power since the amp is only pushing the mids and tweeters . I could not be happier with the overall sound of my system, the Mc is, IMO, a gorgeous amp and it performs flawlessly. I could not be happier with my system.
