Today's Fresh Catch is the restored vintage mint+ McIntosh MX110Z tuner-preamplifier that I purchased from vintage vacuum-tube specialist Tom Manley at McIntosh Audio, and was restored by Terry DeWick in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The MX110Z is a beauty for sure! Here's a left side view:

Here's the other side ...

Here's a top-front view ...

I haven't even read through the entire manual yet, so I'd better get busy.

The tuner in the McIntosh MX110Z is fantastic! I plugged in my Magnum Dynalab ST-2 antenna and tuned into Northwest Public Radio. The Inland Folk with Dan Meher show was playing and the music flowing out of my Westminsters was rich, warm, colorful, intensely rhythmic, and a ball to listen to!

I first tried the MX110Z without a step-up transformer and it sounded it pretty nice, but its sounding like I'll need to get out my Auditorium 23 tranny and add it into the system. Promising.

Is there a down side to the McIntosh MX110Z? I didn't show a back view of the MC110Z, but if I would have you would see that the RCA inputs/outputs are spaced more closely on vintage components than they are on modern components. The extra large sized RCAs of my favored Panatela interconnects were just too big to fit on the vintage spacing of the inputs/outputs of the MX110Z.

Anyways, as I get some more time listening to the MX110Z I'll report back and tell you more about it. My first impressions are that the MX110Z has a great tuner and a good phono section, and of course it complements my vintage Mac MC240 and MC30 amps perfectly!

Thanks for stopping by!