MAC Autoformers?

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

George,
You are still saying that it's a Band-aid, and I disagree.

 I’ll hazard a guess that Mac chose to use autoformers way back when early transistors weren’t as reliable. They chose to use the autoformers to increase reliability (which way back was part of Mac’s separation from much of the competition) and because it fit in with design parameters that they were already comfortable with. Most speakers of that era were thought to be used with tubes by the end user, that might not have realized the compromises that the autoformers introduced. IMHO, there is no good reason to use autoformers with the rugged transistors that have been available for almost 5 decades since then.