New Mcintosh products at CES???

Curious here too.... Arthur

I saw photos somewhere,on the internet.... looked like possibly a new speaker design, but I haven't kept up, maybe it has been out awhile. Rather than a separate tweeter tower, like some of their earlier models, this was integrated with vertical columns of tweeters and mids, kinda like their old top of the line model from years ago.....or ala newer designs like pipedreams......then it looked like the sub was attached behind the front screen, like some Genesis models, 350 or 350SE. I've thought Mac speakers sounded pretty darn good, they are set up for easy bi or tri amping.......I had them in a past system, once set up & tweaked I was happy for several years till I moved on to ribbons......under-rated IMHO.

I sat in on the McIntosh speaker presentation. It certainly was not designed for audiophiles. It was designed for Home Theater dealers. The type of HT dealer who sells to those who have lots of cash to burn and know absolutely nothing about high end audio; and only know brand names like McIntosh. The demonstration was very similar to those Bose demonstrations that you would hear in one of Bose's company stores in malls, etc, but for big spenders.

The big thing about the speakers from what they were saying was that they could easily handle something like 1200 watts of power (maybe higher) without distortion. They then proceeded to play some movie segments to showed off how incredibly loud they could play without distorting. Still sounded bad from my humble audiophile perspective.

I was expecting Sugarbrie's response - and got it.

I went to the McIntosh suite in the Alexis Park. They used the "Boardroom" (entire floor) just as they did last year. I saw their new 400 watt stereo amp. I also heard their 2 new speakers hooked up to the new amp and the 851 DVD/CD player, in a separate small room to demo stereo only.

The sounds were good, however given the nature of the show, it was impossible to optimize the sound system for the room, causing the system to fall short of it's potential.

The new speakers are "Big & Tall" and very expensive. I was most impressed by their little speaker, the Academy LS320. It had very fine sound.

Still great stuff, great company, gotta love those big blue meters!

Hey Sternart - what speakers did you have? Do you remember the model name? I heard the LS360 and thought they were mighty impressive in all regards. Arthur

Lets see model number....its been a few years they were XRT 18's or XRT 17's.......next to the huge top of the line model.....there was a box with 2-12' woofers and a 5" midrange and then a separate tweeter tower that had 13-1" tweeters.......I liked them, and was happy for 5 or 6 years....but like my current Genesis 201's better.