Best Of

I begin writing this by saying that I never thought I would ever find myself in a position to be able to acquire a McIntosh preamp brand new in the box given the price tag for a piece like the C2800 is prohibitively expensive on my budget. I have been quite pleased with the tube analog C2300 that have I have been using for nearly 2 years. It has been an outstanding performer and I had no intention or desire to be replacing anything at this time. Then Magnolia loses the product line and the opportunity to step up became something to really think about. It has been a six month long odyssey to get to the point where we are now, and that is a shiny new C2800 in my Audio room.

Let’s start off by talking briefly about the C2300. It is McIntosh’s last all analog tube preamplifier within a single chassis they do make a C12000 but that piece is well out of price range at over $20,000. It is a bit insane how expensive getting into high-end Audio can be these days, but with that said, gear like the C2300 comes up on the used market as a relative bargain. I purchased mine from a gentleman who took the best of care of it and it performs as if it were brand new. Sonically this is the best preamp I have ever had in my system.. It just seems to do everything right. The addition of the SimAudio 680d DAC took things to a completely different level. Everything that I’ve been hoping to get out of my system came true. Details, micro details sounds stage focus resolution, everything just felt right. To be honest, I never really felt it necessary to upgrade and I was perfectly happy with what I had.









That said, in this hobby we’re always looking for something better and for me the convenience of features offered by the C2800, including the ability to add subwoofers directly to the pre-amplifier and the upgrade ability for the DAC seem to make sense. Being happy with what I already had, I also felt I needed to give this new preamp a try. With Magnolia basically giving these things away at cost because they are no longer an authorized seller, it made getting my hands on one a bunch easier.

The C2800 shares a strong family resemblance to previous generations of Macintosh preamps. What has changed upfront is that they have changed the controls around a bit so as to reduce the number of buttons coming through the black glass front panel they have also raised up the display by approximately 1 inch which makes viewing from the listening position a bit easier. installing it in my system was fairly straightforward, but this time I also needed to download firmware so that the Macintosh could talk to my computer and home network. This is a big step for me because I am not at all computer savvy, and it required a phone call to Doug down on San Diego to help me get through it. Soon it was playing music and I will go into listening impressions in a bit more detail later. Suffice to say that the similarities between the two preamplifiers are so close that it is impossible to pick out one over the other. This was expected but still surprising, with the one area that the C 2800 does improve upon is the phono stage. The other area of big improvement is in control. You can use the remote control and the buttons on the face panel to get through things, but it is much easier to use the Macintosh control app on my iPad. From there I can control source, volume, tone control, and independent gain levels for each input. These functions and a few more would prove invaluable as I go forward, evaluating the new preamplifier.