Mcintosh MC7100 opinion

Check to see that your tweeters are working! :)

Best,

E

Parasound Halo has enough power reserves to move your speakers and even more demanding speakers than yours.
In general I am not a big fan of B&W speakers always found them laid back and too bright .how long do you your speakers ? Maybe it’s time to move to other speakers ?

What speaker cables are you using?

FWIW, $700 for a good condition MC7100 is very reasonable.  If you trust the seller and have the spare cash, you should strongly consider buying it.  Especially if it's a late model with the balanced inputs.

That said, Erik has passed along good advice. I'd add fooling around with speaker position and double-checking all electrical connections. Those are always less costly than changing gear.

  Good luck and happy listening! 

This MC7100 is the baby brother of the MC7200. The circuit design in these two amps is very different from MAC’s autoformer based designs. These amps are lighter and run hotter, McIntosh made these amps to drive harder (other than 8ohm) speaker loads and were popular around the early-mid 90’s. The sound of the 7200 is very nice, warm and dynamic with great detail, solid low end. These amps will pair well with many loudspeakers as this was there design intention.

P.S. the balanced inputs are just wired with the RCA's. XLR connections dose not make it a balanced circuit design. They are Direct Coupled amps.

http://www.roger-russell.com/amplif2.htm#mc7100

Matt M

Thanks to all's feedback so far.
 
- I checked, the tweeters are working as expected.
- I'm running Nordost Gold Flatline II bi-wire cables.  A family member of mine suggest that the cables may not be good enough but I used to pair them with 805N before and it was fine so I'm not sure...
- I have had several chances to demo newer Mcintosh amp with the latest B&W 800 D3 and 700 S2 series at local Magnolia and fairly impressive with the results which led me down this path looking into Mcintosh gear.
- The locally advertised MC-7100 does show balanced input.  Maybe if I'm lucky, I could bring my speakers and get a demo at the seller's place...

Reselling a 7100 would be an easy task if it didn’t work out, but I tend to agree with others that there must be something else going on here. 

I assume you are currently running the 805s bi-wired.  Have you tried using jumpers and running single-wired?  For some reason, my speakers sound MUCH better single-wired, fwiw. I think it has to do with how well the internal wiring of the speaker is implemented.