Article: Review | McIntosh RS200 Wireless Speaker

[bluesman]

4 hours ago, ShawnC said:

When It's mostly acoustic guitars and clean voices, It's hard to screw that up on a recording

I respectfully disagree with this.  Accurate capture and playback of acoustic guitars (and human voices) is one of the more difficult tasks for a recording engineer.  Presenting a lifelike acoustic guitar sound and image (ie not too big and not too small) is not that difficult.  But an accurate recording sounds like the guitar that was recorded, rather than a generic instrument.

 

A Gibson J200 sounds quite different from a Martin O-16NY, and a big archtop with a carved spruce top (eg an 18” Gibson Super 400 or an original Epiphone Emperor) sounds quite different from a 16” laminated maple box like the ES175 that Wes Montgomery played on his first few albums.  Similarly, a single cone resonator guitar like a National Style 0 sounds very different from a tricone.

 

There are many well known and widely loved recordings on which it’s not at all clear what’s being played.  This often reflects the general belief that they all sound alike, which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

 

Good single unit speaker systems like the reviewed unit are actually well suited to acoustic guitar reproduction. The sound source is similar to a guitar, with different parts generating different spectral segments and projecting the sound from what’s really an effective single point once you’re at least a few feet away from it.

 

I do think it important to consider the cabinet on which you place it.  A big wooden box with 10+ cubic feet of interior space and unbraced flat surfaces can add a lot of unwanted resonance. It’s not dissimilar to an acoustic guitar of similar size.

 

I’d also add that the latest BT AptX HD sounds decent+ and is not your father’s Bluetooth.  But if you want to use a BT device in a home theater or MC system, you have to use the latest low latency codecs - and I can hear a slight degradation in definition and presentation between HD (better) and LL.  The LL smears everything just enough to hear it in better systems.  
 

OTOH, I haven’t found a MC distribution system that lets me send individual channels over a network.  So I don’t know how we could use one or more of these units for HT or MC audio - and this Mac piece would probably be an excellent rear pair.  You can use LL BT driven by a MC DAC to drive powered speakers in decent synch with acceptable (although sometimes barely audible) delays among them, if you can’t run wires and want bigger sound in a particular space than your TV or stereo system will provide.

 

I really like this McIntosh device, and the review is stellar - informative, easy to read, and enjoyable.  I won’t be spending 3 large on such a device, but if I wanted one this would be high on my list.  It’s great to know that the sheer physical pleasure of McIntosh products persists unchanged through all these years and ownership changes. I think Frank would be pleased.

[bluesman]

1 hour ago, ShawnC said:

I didn’t say anything about being accurate. Just that a human voice and or an acoustic guitar or combo has a fantastic sound quality to listen too. You could say the same for a violin and vocals or whatever. But any decent engineer should baby able to recreate the human voice and an acoustic or whatever without an trivial problems. Now to listen to a portion of music and pick out every detail like what model of guitar and guitar strings, pickups, amps and mics that were used are beyond the scope of this thread and wasn’t what my post was about. 

Wow - I'm sorry you took umbrage at my post. To be honest, I didn't (and still can't) imagine that it brought so negative a response.  To me (and, I bet, to most audiophiles), a recording that masks or alters gross differences in SQ to the point at which they become inaudible is screwed up by any definition.

 

The differences I'm describing are not so subtle that it takes any knowledge of guitars to hear them, and it doesn't matter whether or not you know which is which.  What matters is that you can hear the differences I'm discussing - they are big and should be clearly audible over any half decent system.  

 

The usual subject of sound quality discussions is over vague and subjective subtleties like harshness, clarity, warmth, balance, etc.  The sonic differences between a Martin D28 and a Gibson L50 are huge - they dwarf harshness, clarity etc in audibility and in importance to the musical program.   Any audiophile should be able to tell that they're different instruments when hearing them side by side.  Of course you don't know which instrument is which - there's no reason you should, and it doesn't change what I'm saying at all.

 

Listen to the difference between these two guitars played solo.  Each is ideally suited to the music being played and the way in which it's played.  Neither performance would sound the way the performer or the engineer intended it to sound if played on the other guitar.

 

 

 

[bluesman]

19 minutes ago, ShawnC said:

Again sorry, @bluesman 

No worries! Your posts are appropriate expressions of a valid point of view, and I appreciate your clarification.  But we see many AS posts about minor distinctions in sound quality (many of whose very existence is in dispute among audiophiles) from people who strangely dismiss major sonic differences that they should be hearing, as demonstrated by those two guitar videos I posted.  I'd almost go so far as to say that anyone who can't hear any difference between them (a Maton concert body flat top and a 17" d'Aquisto archtop) might want to reconsider calling himself or herself an audiophile. 

 

There's absolutely no reason for anyone to know anything about specific instruments to understand, appreciate, and love music.  But you'd have to screw up recording these guys and their guitars really badly to make them sound alike.  The same is true for voices.  I've heard some recordings of Sarah Vaughn and of Ella Fitzgerald in which it was not easy to identify which of the two was singing.  And their voices both changed a lot as they aged.  Fortunately, there are so many good recordings of each over the years that you can appreciate how their voices matured and became more expressive.  Hearing all of these things and much more is part of the experience of listening to music.

 

PS:  I"m not a recording engineer - I'm a musician.