VINYL GOES GREEN
McIntosh brings a warm glow to its latest turntable.
First up, then, we need to sort out a question we’ve long had regarding products from McIntosh. Their illumination. We can think of no other audio brand which is so defined by its lights and colour — backlit laser-cut glass front panels, softly-lit bouncing power meters. Head to a hi-fi show and you can almost locate the McIntosh room by the distinguished green glow which emanates from the room, and the sighs of hi-fi fans as they enter to face a set of racks loaded with this most iconic and desirable of brands.
But is it green? McIntosh never mentions green — it goes on about its “signature McIntosh blue watt meters” (sometimes nailing the shade more accurately as ‘teal’). So green versus blue — is this like that dress, where you see gold’n’white, we see black’n’blue? Should we agree to meet on turquoise? Nope, it’s just that the blue meters have been around longest, ever since the 1960s, back when McIntosh amplifiers were used to power Woodstock, and through the 1970s when The Grateful Dead used 48 McIntosh MC2300 amplifiers to deliver 28,800 watts from its famous ‘Wall of Sound’ PA. The now-green McIntosh signature, on the other hand, used to be gold, its lettering screenprinted onto the reverse of those thick glass front panels. Modern McIntosh instead back-illuminates the signature, and other things, in green. Lots of green.
Equipment
Perhaps most green of all have been its turntables. The current range-topping MT10 has a massive 6cm-thick 5.4kg silicone acrylic platter that spins on a cushion of air, elevated by a custom magnetic bearing, and illuminated from below so that the whole platter glows green (yes, green), while a rather superfluous ‘speed meter’ is positioned on the front, clearly just to bring that splash of teal to the fascia. The MT10 is hypnotic; to see it is to want it. But at $20,995, it may remain aspirational for many. Perhaps the MT5 turntable, with a still-quite-hypnotic floating 2.3kg 4cm-thick illuminated platter, at $12,995?
Or McIntosh’s new third deck, the MT2 turntable reviewed here. It would be a bit rude to call it entry-level, so let’s call it relatively affordable, at $7995. The platter isn’t illuminated, it’s black, and there’s no teal meter on
display here. But two layers of acrylic plates top the plinth base of black-lacquer finished MDF, and these do incorporate “customdesigned fibre-optic light diffusers and extra-long-life light-emitting diodes” in order to shine through with that pleasing shade of green whenever the platter is rotating.
Besides, there’s more to McIntosh than illumination of colour. The company’s primary goal is, of course, the illumination of music. To that end, the company has built to the lower price here with a different set of materials. An inner platter of CNC-precision milled aluminium supports a solid inch-thick black outer platter of polyoxymethylene, an engineering thermoplastic characterised by its high strength, hardness and rigidity. The inner platter rotates with a polished and tempered steel shaft in a sintered bronze bushing, and is belt-driven by a chassis-decoupled DC drive motor with its current coming from an external voltage-stabilised power supply.
The tonearm has a wand of duralumin, also known as dural-aluminium, a long-established hardened alloy of aluminium combined with copper and (usually) manganese and magnesium. The vertical bearings use precision ceramic surfaces with damping fluid; the horizontal bearing is a gimballed sapphire design.
Lastly the cartridge is, as for all three McIntosh turntables, a moving-coil type. Normally that would require a specifically moving-coil phono input on your amplifier, where many amps cater only to the higher outputs of moving-magnet cartridges. And with McIntosh’s top MT10 turntable that is indeed the case. But both the MT5 and this MT2 come with a Sumiko moving-coil cartridge that has a high enough output (up to 2.5mV) to be compatible with not only moving-coil phono inputs but also moving-magnet inputs. (If you need a phono stage, McIntosh’s MP100 Phono Preamplifier is considered a ‘companion product’.) The cartridge itself is a Sumiko Blue Point No.2, which plays a huge role, of course, in the system’s sound quality. It uses an alloy cantilever and an elliptical diamond stylus. McIntosh’s Australian distributor Synergy Audio handily also distributes Sumiko, and a replacement Blue Point No. 2 will currently set you back $799.
Performance
If vinyl is partly about the physical interaction with the medium, then the setting up of a turntable makes this doubly so — no other hi-fi component requires such a task of careful assembly and calibration. But as befits a lower-echelon turntable (by McIntosh’s standards), the task here is much simplified with the MT2, since its cartridge comes pre-installed, and indeed calibrated, along with preset tracking and anti-skating forces. The cartridge overhang and arm height are similarly preset from the factory.
But there’s still a bit to be done. Once all the layers and bits had been removed from the packaging, we began by reversing the instructions provided and making the power and signal cables to the rear socketry at the start — while you can still move the plinth around, rather than waiting till the end after everything is carefully balanced. Then it was a case of working through the well-illustrated instructions in the manual. The MT2 ships with a protective mesh on the long spindle, so we removed that, and donned the supplied white gloves to guide the belt around the inner platter and on to the pulley (see pictures above). We added the heavy main platter and felt mat. McIntosh supplies a nice (teal) bubble balance to make sure the platter is level in all directions, and the MT2’s feet are your friends to achieve this, able to rotate to raise or drop until bubble centrality is achieved all over the platter.
You slide the counterweight up the back of the arm as usual, though here McIntosh supplies a vial of bearing oil and suggests lightly greasing the counterweight’s hole before doing so. There’s a line marking its required position, though we found this hard to judge accurately, so we made use of the supplied pivoting metal Stylus Tracking Force Gauge to adjust the counterweight’s position for the recommended 2.0 grams, then returning the antiskating weight to the factory position from the minimal required to set the force.