Optimizing McIntosh 7300s as monoblocks


I have been lucky enough to find 2 MC7300s to drive a pair of Cello Strad Premieres in a BIG room. Can anyone tell me the best way to connect the tri-wire Cello Strings to the amp taps? They are bridged and using just the 4 ohm taps, as recommended, isn't cutting it. Is it risky to use the 2 ohm taps (remember: bridged, thats 2+2=4, and 4 is the minimal impedance of the Cellos). 6 is nominal. So should I use the 2 ohm taps for bass and the 4 ohm taps for mid and high?

Thanks one mil...

/J
jsterritt

Showing 2 responses by kirkus

Go ahead and try the 2-ohm taps, you won't hurt a thing. In this case, you will actually be drawing less current from the output stage, so the amp will breathe easier. Even if you were going the other way . . . well, Mac amps are pretty hard to blow up.

Also, some Macs had an option to parallel the outputs for mono as an alternative to bridging them . . . I can't remember whether the 7300 is one of them. Not that doing this is necessarily better, but maybe one more thing to try.
The output taps are very similar to the gear ratios on your auto transmission . . . in this case, how fast you can go depends on the balance of how high the engine redline is, and how steep a hill you're going up.

If you correlate maximum audio power to maximum vehicle speed, then the amplifier's internal power-supply voltage is like the engine redline, and how steep the hill is correlates to how much current the speaker is drawing (the impedance). The usual penalty for "lugging the engine" (being on a higher-impedance amplifier tap) is an increase in distortion, and sometimes a modification of bandwidth and transient response. The penalty for being on a lower-impedance tap is a reduction in gain and power output, but if the amp is operating in a more linear fashion, it may still sound more powerful.

While I'm not familiar with the Cellos in particular, most dynamic speakers require more current (and power) in the bass range. The only thing to keep in mind if you're going to use different amplifier taps for the bass and mids/highs is that the gain will be different, so you'll have to turn down the mid/high amp a bit to get the same balance.

Also, you shouldn't use more than one tap on a single amplifier channel at one time. While there are some hypothetical situations where this could kinda work, it will most likely cause a very demanding load on the amplifier, and adversely affect the damping/HF performance of the output transformer/autoformer.