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Equalizer for McIntosh preamp - advice, please

I just received a McIntosh C200, which is an amazing preamp, but which does have no equalizing possibilities, as its smaller brother, the C42, does. It does have, however, a possibility tu use a sound processor with the preamp, which can then be turned on and off. As I do have a problem only with a nasty bass standing wave at 40 and 80 Hz, which is audible mostly with dynamic pop music, I think about including an equalizer. Does or did McIntosh produce such equalizers - maybe even for the bass only? And in general,
which good equalizers are there around? I am happy with the sound, and would not like to spend thousands of dollars line for a Tact room correction system. Any good equalizers with good bang for the buck?
hassel
rives
953 posts
 
You will see I'm very biased here, but our company designed a PARC, parametric adaptive room compensation system specifically for the purpose that you mention (room modes that have prominent bass bumps). It's much less expensive than most other eqs out there and sounds better (we've tested it in several very high end systems--the results were fairly amazing even in good quality rooms with Genesis 201 speakers). The PARC is on our website at:
http://www.rivesaudio.com/PARC.html. Also feel free to call or e-mail us with any questions you might have.
ljgj
955 posts
 
All Mac Eq's are no longer in production but are often for sale including the bass only version on Ebay more so than Audiogon. I am not familiar with the one mentioned in the above response but it might be worth looking into. Also Legacy makes a steradian bass unit which works for such applications but it sells for 1200 from Legacy. A friend uses one with his Mac C100 with good results.
newbee
4,821 posts
 
FWIW the only way you can really kill your standing waves, and still retain good bass, electronically is with either a parametric equalizer or a 1/3rd band equalizer. You see the latter on EBay every once in a while.
aball
2,018 posts
 
The McIntosh MQ108 is exactly what you are looking for. You can do a million adjustments with it between 20 and 1000 Hz. It was designed to resolve your standing wave problem. The MQ107 will do all freqencies but you have to swap out plug-in caps that come with it. Ljgj is right - hard to find now but I have seen them on ebay now and again.
rives
953 posts
 
I've used a McIntosh, the 104, 107 and 108. While this unit was good, it had a few short comings and only one advantage (it's relatively cheap). It's noisy, it definitely adds noise into the signal. I was bi-amping so the noise wasn't a big problem (because I used the device on the bass signal only), but I could not use the device full range as it really degraded the transparency in the midrange and treble. The other problem, as the limitation of frequency settings and Q factors (they only have 2 Q factors--which they call a broad band and narrow band--so I don't know what the actual Q is). It was actually the basic idea of getting the bass right through my personal use of the McIntosh that drove me to design the PARC, but without the above limitations. You can still get used ones from Audio Classics I believe.
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