MAC Autoformers?

roxy54
Did you perform this test?

Yes I had a customer trade a pair in, he tried them on his Lamm 1.1’s and didn’t like them, I put them on my very good solid state amps with my ML ESL speakers to see what they did, and it made them sound like old an Williamson tube amp soft polite and rounded. As I said the same years ago in Audiogon.

Mac did build good amps, they were the 275's, should never have gone to ss with transformers. 

Cheers George

my guess is of course not......geez.....

Really!!!

Thanks George.

Honestly, I think the big thing is taste. 

From the perspective of creating an ideal voltage source, the autotransformer is garbage, but if that tickles your ears, and it is your money, then that's what you should get. 

That simple. 

Best,

E

Thanks Erik,
Taste is what it’s all about. Saying that autoformers are a fix for a flawed amplifier design as Stanwal said is in my view just ignorant. It is just another way of going about things, and for some of us, myself included, it produces a very good result.

Saying that autoformers are a fix for a flawed amplifier design as Stanwal said is in my view just ignorant.

I don’t think Stanwal meant that, they didn’t purposely go out and design a flawed amp.

I believe he meant that with an autoformer an amp can be designed with lax’ed parameters eg: that make it stable. And that an autoformer can then isolate it from the bad outside world speaker emf etc, that may make it go into oscillation or ring or whatever. This this autoformer makes this amp listenable and reliable. It's a Band-aid.

But if the amp had great design in the first place as not to have any lax’ed performance issues, the an autoformer is definitely a backwards step regarding sound quality.

Cheers George