Name: Vintage McIntosh MR 78 // FM Solid-State Tuner
Brand: McIntosh
SKU: 7030444785832
Availability: OutOfStock

This is a very clean example of the legendary McIntosh MR 78 tuner widely considered to be the very best tuner that Mac produced in this era.

Production

1972-84

Condition

9/10

Serial No.

AD8723

Orig. MSRP

$899

Restoration

Full service check
Cleaned controls, switches, and chassis
Calibrated MPX
Separation is better than 45db
Distortion tested lower at .3%

Factory Specs

Type Mono/Stereo Tuner

Tuning Bands FM

Tuning Scale Analogue

FM Tuning Range 88 to 108 MHz

Sensitivity 2.5uV (FM)

Signal to Noise Ratio 75dB (FM)

Distortion 0.2% (FM)

Selectivity 55dB (FM)

Frequency response 20Hz to 18kHz (FM)

Output 2500mV

Dimensions 16"W x 5.5"H x 13"D inches

Weight 27lbs

Documentation

MR78 Owner's Manual MR78 Brochure

The History of McIntosh

Founded in 1949, McIntosh is known for offering distinguished home audio systems that deliver the ultimate experience in music and film. Offering products for two-channel stereo sound systems and multi-channel home theaters with surround sound, McIntosh continues to define the ultimate home audio entertainment...
[ Read More ]

Liner Notes

Richard Modafferi was a senior engineer at McIntosh Laboratory from 1968 to 1974. His first stab at a new tuner that could do better was the MR 77. That model, introduced in 1970, was acclaimed among audiophiles—and it was the subject of an article by Modafferi in the November 1970, issue of IEEE Transactions on Broadcast and Television Receivers. And then Modafferi outdid himself with the MR 78 tuner, which came out in 1972.

The MR 78’s distinction was a new intermediate frequency filter, the culmination of a design that Modafferi had begun working on as a graduate student at the Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) in the mid-1960s. He dubbed it the Rimo filter (a concatenation of the first two letters of his first and last name). In a superheterodyne radio receiver, which all FM receivers are, the incoming signal is mixed with that of a local oscillator to produce an intermediate frequency (IF) that is lower than that of the carrier frequency of the received signal. There are several reasons for doing this. A really big one is that the lower value of this IF makes it easier to filter out nearby sources of interference. Basically, Modafferi’s Rimo took a leap beyond existing IF filters by applying a computer to fine-tune the filter’s frequency response, and also by minimizing “intermodulation distortion,” which plagued IF filters at the time.

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