McIntosh Laboratory: High Fidelity Made in Binghamton

In the late nineteen forties, a broadcast engineer named Frank McIntosh had a problem that was bothering him: the audio amplifiers available for home listening were, by professional standards, terrible. They distorted sound, they couldn't handle the full range of the human ear, and the more power you demanded, the worse they sounded. McIntosh decided to fix this himself.

Working in Silver Spring, Maryland, with a young engineer he had hired named Gordon Gow, McIntosh spent several years developing what they would call the unity coupled circuit. It was an elegant solution to the problem of output transformer distortion, using a symmetrically balanced design that kept the signal clean across the full audible range. In nineteen forty-nine they published a technical paper in Audio magazine describing the new circuit, and the same year they received their first patent.

The resulting amplifier, called the fifty W one, could deliver fifty watts of power at less than one percent distortion, flat from ten hertz to one hundred thousand hertz. For home audio in nineteen forty-nine, those numbers were essentially unheard of. The unity coupled circuit worked so well that McIntosh still uses a version of it in amplifiers built today.

In nineteen fifty-one the company relocated to Binghamton, New York, and in nineteen fifty-six built its permanent home on Chambers Street, where it has remained ever since. McIntosh amplifiers became the gold standard of high-fidelity audio, the equipment that serious listeners bought when money was less important than sound quality. Frank McIntosh retired in nineteen seventy-seven. Gordon Gow led the company until his death. The brand was eventually acquired by Clarion, then passed through several other owners.

But the amplifiers kept selling, kept winning awards, and kept sounding the way Frank McIntosh and Gordon Gow designed them to sound when they were trying to solve a problem in a Maryland workshop more than seventy years ago.