Miley
Member
The line worth reading twice on McIntosh's new CS7500 is buried well past the blue meters: the HDMI input is ARC, not eARC, and any Dolby or DTS multichannel soundtrack arriving on it gets folded down to two channels. That is stated plainly, to their credit, and it defines the whole product.
Plenty of high-end stereo brands have started bolting a TV input onto their preamps, and I understand why. The buyer already has the system, the TV is in the same room, and running the telly through the good speakers beats the built-ins by a comfortable margin. But ARC rather than eARC caps you at what that older return path can carry, so lossless multichannel is off the table before the downmix even happens. If your plan is to feed this from a 4K player, you are sending it a compressed stream and then throwing away the channels.
Taken as a two-channel component it looks properly specified: six analog inputs including a switchable MM/MC phono stage, seven digital inputs, USB doing native DSD512, a quad balanced 32-bit DAC, and a second output pair assignable to subs. Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify Connect are all native, and it is Roon Ready. The odd gap is Bluetooth, where you get aptX HD and Adaptive but no LDAC and no aptX Lossless, on a $12,500 box.
I would not buy this to improve TV sound, and I do not think McIntosh expects anyone to. But the ARC input will absolutely be used that way.
Is anyone here actually running their TV into a high-end stereo preamp, and does the downmix bother you in practice?
Plenty of high-end stereo brands have started bolting a TV input onto their preamps, and I understand why. The buyer already has the system, the TV is in the same room, and running the telly through the good speakers beats the built-ins by a comfortable margin. But ARC rather than eARC caps you at what that older return path can carry, so lossless multichannel is off the table before the downmix even happens. If your plan is to feed this from a 4K player, you are sending it a compressed stream and then throwing away the channels.
Taken as a two-channel component it looks properly specified: six analog inputs including a switchable MM/MC phono stage, seven digital inputs, USB doing native DSD512, a quad balanced 32-bit DAC, and a second output pair assignable to subs. Qobuz, Tidal and Spotify Connect are all native, and it is Roon Ready. The odd gap is Bluetooth, where you get aptX HD and Adaptive but no LDAC and no aptX Lossless, on a $12,500 box.
I would not buy this to improve TV sound, and I do not think McIntosh expects anyone to. But the ARC input will absolutely be used that way.
Is anyone here actually running their TV into a high-end stereo preamp, and does the downmix bother you in practice?
