Also: Es gab - leider! - diese schon angemerkten kritischen Kundenbewertungen zu MA-252 und -352:
"I had an MA252 for a few months. It was not bad, but nothing exceptional. Volume control knob had poor action. General build quality was average, at best. Certainly not premium. SQ was OK, but bass control wasn't up to much. As a Hybrid, it was easily beaten by a Copland for much less money."
"I would have to disagree on McIntosh holding value well. I'm quite a keen watcher of prices and the market; you see 252s hanging around for ages."
"Yes, it's quite strange and very frustrating. At first listen on the Sopra 1s, I thought it was very good and I thought I liked what it was doing with the sound signature. After about 100 hours on it. It has become nearly unlistenable! It is is shrill, thin, metallic with a screaming, screeching treble that would wake up the dead. The midrange is recessed and distant, totally unexpressive. The bass has all but disappeared and when it is there it is loose and flabby. Very poor performance overall. Voices are literally transformed into a litany of sibilance unlike anything I've ever heard. Do you know of any songs without words beginning with S or T? I don't! In fact, this thing has transformed my well-known reference recordings from Steely Dan, Donald Fagen, Pink Floyd, Sade and Deutsche Grammophone classical composers into horrifying calamities of sonic agony. I still have trouble realizing how bad this really is.
So, what did I do? I changed 3 sets of speaker cables, interconnects and power cords. No effect. I rolled a full set of new production Gold Lions to no effect. I then purchased some expensive NOS Telefunkens and got no effect. I changed the source and it did nothing. I then connected some Sonus faber Concertinos and it was the same, all treble and no bass.
Even funnier, I recounted this experience on some McIntosh sites and FB groups looking for advice and suggestions. I was summarily banished as a heretic because I did not proclaim that McIntosh was made by God himself and that it made the very sound of angel's voices singing from on High. It was probably even worse than the Naim forum. It was inconceivable to these people that the MA352 could be considered anything less than a mysterious, magical box that makes heavenly, blissful sound.
I stand firmly by my impressions. The amplifier is overrated, overpriced and underwhelming. It performs poorly and is not musical at all. This is the first amplifier where I hear "confusion" in the musical signal. On complex passages, the thing gets lost, confused and drowns out details of instruments and voices and combines them into an unintelligible mush that really is just noise. Never heard such a demonstration of sonic incompetence in all my years, which are numerous at this stage.
Now I have an ungodly expensive chunk of dorky metal ruining any hope of listening to music. I swear a 50$ Chinese Class D from Aliexpress could do just as well..."
Und wenn zahlreiche Gebraucht-Angebote von Privatanbietern in den Kleinanzeigen auftauchen - und das war ja vor 1, 2 Jahren der Fall - dann ist das schon ein Indikator dafür, daß es Unzufriedenheiten mit den Geräten gegeben hat - das sehe und beurteile übrigens nicht nur ich so!
Aber: Beide Hybrid-Verstärker-Modelle gibt es ja schon etliche Jahre. Ich gehe davon aus, daß die Kritik sich auf Exemplare der ersten Serien bezog und McIntosh die Probleme inzwischen ausgemerzt hat.
Und von daher beglückwünsche ich Jaaansen zu seinem MA-252 Exemplar - ich denke, es ist ein in jüngerer Zeit gekaufter MA-252 - und wünsche ihm viel Hörgenuß damit.
Insbes. aber bei Gebrauchtangeboten (beider Modelle), wäre ich sehr vorsichtig, würde mir das Gerät eingehend/ausführlich anhören und den Anbieter genau nach dessen Verkaufsgründen befragen.
Beste Grüße
Bernhard