Why so negative about McIntosh speakers?

11-16-09: Newbee
LOL. There are a lot of fine speakers that get tons on criticism in these pages. But since you don't own them and probably haven't heard them, you just assume that it is all warranted.

Newbee, your post seems to be attacking Sit for no reason. Nowhere in his post does he assume that the criticism of other speakers on Audiogon is necessarily warranted. What's up with that?

Foster, thanks for ur defense but I understand Newbee to mean that w/o hearing a unit's performance one may just take another's word on it... .

HOWEVER, the only input I have ever received about the criticism of Mac speakers is like what Stanwal and Hifitime wrote above.

Can anyone describe in audio terminology what they believe the Mac speakers (in general) are lacking? I have read some of what Roger Russel wrote about the development of the "early-on" Macs. I found it impressive. My ears tell me he was onto something.

Would imagine the "bad rap" came from their dismal offerings in the 70's. Had a room mate with a pair of "low boy" style 250 pounders that looked like "end tables" in cheap fruit wood. Really disgusting looking & not very exemplary sounding. 4 or 5 way speaker in a box seemingly designed for as much diffraction as possible, with a 15" woofer inches from the floor. Looked like it was designed by the marketing department...nice electronics though

Foster 9, One of the problems with posting here is that we are told to seperate paragraphs into shorter groups of sentences or single sentences so that folks can more easily understand. You must consider that the first two paragraphs in my post must be taken together. They are one.

As Sit noted, the roots of these observations live in the posts by Stanwal and Hifitime. But, then if you stripped uninformed comments from these threads it would be a threadbare forum and uninteresting reading to many. :-)

I'm sure that lots of folks (including me) have blind brand predjudices but are considerate enuf to keep them to themselves, at least to keep from looking like a generic fool if nothing else.

Newbee:LOL. There are a lot of fine speakers that get tons on criticism in these pages. But since you don't own them and probably haven't heard them, you just assume that it is all warranted.

Foster_9: Newbee, your post seems to be attacking Sit for no reason. Nowhere in his post does he assume that the criticism of other speakers on Audiogon is necessarily warranted. What's up with that?

After reading it a couple of times, I had interpreted the word "you" in Newbee's post to be used in the sense of "one," which would make it clearly not an attack on anyone. Reworded based on that assumption, the comment would be "But since one doesn't own them and probably hasn't heard them, there is a natural tendency to just assume that it is all warranted."

Best regards,
-- Al