Alright, well here's the scoop.
I used my iPhone to take crappy pictures as to make this review extra special.
The gear used was as follows:
Bel Canto CD2
Klyne System 6 Preamplifier
McIntosh MC402
Emotiva XPA-2
Monitor Audio PL-200
Audioquest Rocket 88 Speaker cables
Audioquest NGR100 power cables
Synergistic THC interconnects
To start here are a few of those crappy pics.
Started off the day listening to the MC-402.
The first album at bat was Ray LaMontagne's God Willin' and the Creek Don't Rise.
The title track (track 3) sounded pretty good. With this setup the imaging was spot on, the music was rich but I couldn't help but feel that the PL-200's were overpowering the room we were in. I had listened to the PL-100 monitor's in that room prior and failed to notice any sort of muddiness or lack of clarity in the bass and lower mid-bass. Then again, I had never listened to this album with those either, though.
The following track (track 4) and track 9 both sounded excellent but contained the same muddiness. I thought for a while and remembered the album was fairly bass-heavy with a lot of deep frequencies so I figured it was just a bad match for a comparison with these particular circumstances.
Off to CD 2:
Thelonious Monk - Monk's Dream
I know this album well, as it is one of my favorite jazz recordings. The MC-402 did not disappoint with this album, and the bass was noticeably better than on the first CD. The overall result throughout the album was a richness in the bottom end with live sounding drums and detailed and pleasant bass and saxophone. The piano on the MC-402 sounded somewhat muffled compared to what I was used to but I figured it was probably a room effect and/or I was not remembering it right.
Third up for comparison was Guns & Roses Use Your Illusion II
I had listened to this album a while back on a pair of Wilson Sashas and remembered how incredibly live the drums sounded and what a good job they did of making it sound like there was a rock concert in the room.
The PL-200's didn't exactly deliver a rock concert, but the result with the MC-402 was pretty decent. There was good slam in the bass and the vocals sounded very live along with the drums, but there seemed to lack a certain fullness to the midrange. Especially on the track Locomotion, it didn't seem to have the fullness throughout the spectrum I remembered with the Wilson's.
After having listened to this album we swapped over to the XPA-2 to see if there weren't any night and day differences.
Doing the swap quickly, we left GNR on the Bel-Canto and tossed Locomotion on back to back to see if there was any huge difference.
First thing that was noticeably different was the fact that the bass guitar sounded more live. It seemed to have more detail than with the MC-402 and when the music got into it the midrange was back in action. Not quite to the extent that I remember with the Wilson's but without doing an A/B comparison on those speakers I can't really say.
I figured maybe I was just hearing things so I tossed the Monk Album in after having listened to GNR for a while.
The differences on the Monk album were subtle, but one of the major differences was that the muffled sound of the piano from the first time was better. The piano sounded more forward and seemingly sounded much more detailed than before. I have listened to this amp on my setup for many, many hours so I know how that recording sounds on my rig at home and it seems as though the Mac veiled the sound of the piano at least for this recording.
Last up was the LaMontagne disc, and I was in no rush to put it on the player because the first time around the muddiness was such a distraction the music was borderline unlistenable.
To my surprise that muddiness was almost virtually eliminated. I had not expected any major differences, and up until this point they had been subtle but I couldn't believe my ears when I threw the worst tracks on to see how they would sound. The bass was tighter, more controlled, and more detailed. Make no mistake, the album IS bass heavy, but the swap from the 402 to the XPA-2 was literally a huge difference.
It went from being sloppy and seeming like the room was being overpowered to completely fine and clear.
The conclusions I reached from this are:
The MC-402 provides a weightiness to it which sounds wonderful. Make no mistakes, the MC-402 is a veritable beast that does its job very well.
The XPA-2 is a bit more neutral in comparison, but has the undeniable ability to control and produce clear bass way down into the spectrum.
Both amps did a good job with imaging and the liveliness of instruments and vocals, but the XPA-2 won the contest in this scenario in terms of being able to make Monk's piano clearer.
The bass output is a mystery to me. I know McIntosh products, even the solid states, tend to have a warm sound to them and perhaps this "weightiness" in the bottom end is part of that warmth, but in this particular room and with these speakers it didn't work well. Perhaps in a larger room with a different setup the results would be different but after playing the LaMontagne tracks on the XPA-2 in the same room the differences were too large to not take note of.
On the flipside the argument could be made that they were overpowering the room and that the XPA-2 lacked in the bass which made things manageable in the room, but I have a hard time believing that's the case.
In conclusion, in this particular scenario with these components the XPA-2, between me and another listener would have been the amp of choice if we were going to purchase one.
Is the MC-402 more aesthetically pleasing? I would have to say so.
Are they both built like tanks? Yes.
Do they both offer good sound quality? Yes.
Is spending an extra 6200 dollars on the MC402 a wise investment?
It's a tough call, because I only listened to it in one particular room with one particular setup, but I certainly can't see it performing bounds and leaps above the Emotiva when it lost this particular battle by a fair margin.
Keep in mind I am not a professional reviewer of audio equipment, but I did have other people with me who have been in the audio world for quite some time who noticed the same things that I did.
I would like to get these amps together with some serious speakers to see how they hold up in a better room. I'm a stone's throw away from Goodwin's High End in Waltham MA, and they have a dedicated room whose acoustic properties are out of this world. I listened to some Magico Model 6's in it a while back and would be interested in getting both these bad larry's in there for a more definitive comparison.
But for now, it seems as though it's XPA-2: 1 MC-402: 0
