McIntosh Preamp hopes re-railed by a McIntosh C27

I finally saved up enough to try again to upgrade my aging and failing Yamaha C-70 preamp.  The last time I attempted this, if you read my posts, a McIntosh preamp was destroyed by UPS.  It took three months to work it out and I had a very helpful seller!  The C-70 has been giving me trouble for about the last year.  One of the controls kept dropping one of the channels until it was actuated a few times.  You would think this would be cleared up by using it over and over, it was not.  I hate sitting there listening to music and have a channel drop in volume.  So it had to be replaced, I will try to find a good home for it who is knowledgeable in how to repair such things.  I finally managed to have opportunity and funding intersect and was able to purchase another McIntosh preamp.

Yesterday I took delivery of a 1977-1983 McIntosh C27 Preamp.  It was in awesome condition and I purchased it from a repair facility in the Carolina's.  I took a chance with the seller as they had Zero feedback.  I was pleasantly surprised when the boxes arrived and were not damaged.  The packing job done by them was excellent!  The item was just as pictured, which was clean with no damage and very little of the bubbling paint under the glass.  Like I have said before, I don't play the looks of an item, I play the item, so I am usually OK with a bit of cosmetic issues on the equipment I own. I left the seller very positive feedback and sent him a message thanking him for his efforts to get it to me undamaged.

This preamp seems to be legendary in a couple respects.  It was released right about the time the C32 was in production.  The C32 at that time was the baddest-ass preamp you could purchase, IMHO.  It had equalizers, filters, and a bunch of controls to shape the sound in any way you could imagine except reverb.  Interesting that a C27 would be released at the same time as a C32, since it seems to be released out of sequence.  What I have gathered so far is the C27 is a new technology product for McIntosh at that time and had the "new" controls which would become standard from that point on.  These controls are supposed to give excellent fidelity while lasting much longer than the "old" controls would, which is a pretty long time when I consider my MC250 amp is almost 50 years old!  Instead of putting all those equalizer and filter functions and so forth on this product, it is closer to a purist product.  The variable loudness control is interesting and can be defeated when set to flat, but what it does is enhance the lower frequencies at lower volumes to make up for apparent sound loss at lower volumes.  The C27 is more of a pure Preamp, people seem to love this particular model does as it not come up for sale very often, as a matter of fact this was the first one that I had saw on eBay for sale since I started looking.  Once I did some research, and asked a knowledgeable friend, saw the condition and who was selling it, I figured I could not go wrong.  I was right! 
This preamp has a ton of inputs, two phono inputs, (which was the most important factor for me), two aux, two sets of tape deck connections and a tuner input.  It also outputs to two separate amps in stereo and one in mono too, which I love!  (I am thinking of getting my hands on a mono tube amp and running a very efficient set or a single speaker on to simulate the old mono days). The controls feel awesome and very high quality, very precise, no noise and something you would expect on a very expensive product.  No wonder these things last forever and hold their value!  I paid about what it cost new to buy it restored to factory specs.

I think the speaker connectors are a bit on the strange side, but I can understand.  Quite a few amplifiers of the time only have connections for one set of speakers.  What this preamp does is allow you to connect the output from your single set of speaker connections to the inputs in the C27 and then connect up to two sets of speakers to the preamp, allowing the flexibility of playing and controlling an additional or different set of speakers and the headphone jack from the preamp, (the headphone jack is not active unless you have an amplifier's speaker outputs connected to the speaker inputs on the C27).  Very cool idea for the time, but today I think it is unneeded.  I am probably not going to bother hooking it up, although I have an idea or two on how to use that flexibility to play my Christmas party music without too much grief. 

So far the way it works is very nice and I was able to figure most things out pretty quickly.  I spent some enjoyable evening time reading the owners manual before it arrived so I would be familiar with how the controls worked and the features of this preamp.

I had the Yamaha preamp unhooked and the McIntosh hooked up and running in just a few minutes.  I have the cabinet and it is in awesome condition, but I decided to leave the cabinet in the packing box to protect it and run the preamp in the rack without the cabinet to save space and to increase cooling efficiency as it is in tight quarters.  I isolated it from the cabinet with some home-made vibration control feet that I mention in another blog post.  Overall, I was just happy not to hear noisy controls or strange noises.  When I did some late night listening, the glow of the tubes from my Musical Paradise MP301 MK3 tube amp along with the green glow lettering from the McIntosh had a hypnotic effect on me as I sat there listening to jazz at 130 in the morning.

This morning I am using my McIntosh C27 with my McIntosh MC250 amp and the combination sounds excellent!

I was thinking how I am the budget audiophile and this piece cost quite a bit, and how does that fit with the Budget Audiophile Philosophy?  Well, first off, I had to save for nearly a year for a chance to upgrade. Also, when I look at the fact that this may well be my last preamp, then the overall cost for the next 25 years becomes negligible in my opinion.  It is the value of the item sometimes and not the sheer cost that determine the overall budget fitting properties of a purchase.  This is a long-term investment in equipment that does not go down in value. So, if I ever have to sell it, I am pretty confident that I will receive at least what I paid for it. VALUE!


I will be reviewing this more in the future as I do some critical listening.  I just wanted to post that I finally got my preamp upgraded to something flexible enough to remove a few items from the signal path that I had connected prior to this becoming my main preamp on my main system.

My main system now consists of:
Yamaha RxV-2700 home theater receiver
Musical Paradise MP301 Mk3 7WPC Tube Amp
McIntosh MC250 50WPC Stereo Solid-State Amp
McIntosh C27 Stereo Premplifier
Two Turntables - Technics, JVC
Two working Reel to Reel decks - Pioneer, Teac
Nakamichi Cassette Tape Deck
Klipsch KLF-20 three-way speakers
PSB T6 Three-way speakers
Boston Acoustics T930 - Three-way speakers
Paradign Mini Monitor V.5 - Two-way speakers
Computer running JRiver media software through a Schiit DAC connected to the preamp

Stay safe and get some listening time in!

Jeff