Mcintosh MA2275 what's better

I agree totally on the tube rolling, I did that and could not believe the difference it made..... How they can demo these amps in the showrooms with the stock tubes is beyond me..... Now I once hooked up a cd player directly to the amp in section bypassing the preamp section and that sounded better, tighter, focused and more real,
as far my source it's weak. I sold my Basis TT to buy a Linn which I have not acquired and I'm using a cheap ES sony sacd player, it gets me by..... I've been saving up for speakers too, my old Thiels are a complete miss match for the Mac, but I have tried easy to drive monitors and still get too much of a laid back sound but I will say for Classical music it's been amazing.

Before you do any tube rolling, what have you done to improve the acoustics of your room? What have you done as far as speaker positioning? Changes here may give you massive improvements in sound quality at practically no cost.

I have both MC 275 and ARC VT 100. With all tubes changed with Telefunken and E.A.T. ( KT 88 ) the Mac sound us more refined and dynamic. Plus the vol. attenuators allows to direct connect ( S.E.) the phonopreamp to the amp, it makes it a wonderful analog amp. Also the XLR connections for line preamp makes it one of the most flexible amps available, can also be transformed into a 150 Watts monoblock just with a switch. This is for the MKII version, the MK3 dropped the attenuators, witch IMO is sad for the vinyl setups.

I agree that the amp with the attenuators is the one to get. They also have the gold plated xlr connections which were also dropped. I think the Mark 1V is the one with all of the goodies and earlier models. I can see where he is saying that the Mc's have a laid back sound compared to ARC. It to me has a fantastic musical presentation. Much better than almost everything I have ever heard. Maybe it could be something else in your system that needs tweaking.