Company & Product Overview

If you know the name McIntosh, you are aware they produce some of the best built and natural-sounding audio equipment in the world. They have been headquartered in Binghamton NY for over 70 years with some employees working with them for many decades.

When McIntosh sets out to make a new type of product, their engineers are not happy unless it performs better than anything else in its class. When we first heard about the new McIntosh MB20 Bluetooth transceiver, we were very curious to see what McIntosh DNA would find its way inside a product that most people view as just an accessory. In typical McIntosh fashion, the MB20 is far from an accessory and designed with more flexibility than you might think at first glance.

In this article, we will go over all the technical details of what the MB20 can do, and share some use cases on some of the ways you might use it in your home.

Design & Build Quality

The engineers developed the MB20 to address the vast expanse of legacy McIntosh systems out there that had no way to access the new world of streaming music. McIntosh gear lasts for several decades and with streaming-only becoming mainstream in the past few years, there are over 60 years of McIntosh systems in people's homes with no way to easily stream music. And of course, like they always do, when they design a new product, the engineering team usually comes up with some pretty unique features.

Most Bluetooth products you will see are very tiny in physical size with a limited number of connections. The MB20 is far larger due to the better circuitry and audio input and output options. Generally, McIntosh pieces have the classic glass front that is beautifully backlit, but for the MB20, McIntosh chose to go the simple route to keep the price down to make it available to a wider group of their customers and people who own other high-performance audio pieces without streaming.

The MB20 is a basic black box with the McIntosh logo and product name screen printed on the front with the most connections on the rear we have ever seen on a Bluetooth piece of gear.

Features & Technology

Unless you have been totally disconnected from any tech at all, you have probably used Bluetooth at one time or another. It was developed as a way to send audio wirelessly between devices. When it first came out, the audio quality was pretty low, but as with all tech, things have progressed to where it is actually quite good, almost rivaling a wired connection.

Qualcomm, the developers of Bluetooth tech, came out with Bluetooth aptX HD in 2016 and it has been widely adopted as a great way to transmit audio from one device to another with minimal signal loss. As you might suspect, the MB20 uses aptX HD. This transmission method is still compressed but is pretty close to a hard-wired connection.

If you are into audio, you probably also know the quality of the DAC (digital to analog converter) makes a big difference in the sound. This is the device that converts the digital signal to analog. McIntosh uses a very high-performance DAC in the MB20 which is a 32-bit DAC with 192kHz internal processing to optimize sound quality.

Bluetooth aptX HD is present in most new models of wireless headphones and many Android-based phones, but is not available on Apple products. However, it is backward compatible with the Bluetooth transmitter on an iPhone.

Most Bluetooth accessories are either transmitters or receivers, but the MB20 can do both — although not at the same time. This means you can send a streaming music signal to it to get the sound into your legacy system, or you could use it to send the audio from your system to a pair of wireless headphones for example.

The number of inputs and outputs on the MB20 is what really impressed us and caused us to start thinking of interesting ways to use it. For inputs, you get a pair of balanced audio inputs, RCA audio inputs, Toslink digital in, and coax digital in. The output side has the exact same count and type. If you are going to use the digital audio outputs the signal will be 96kHz to make it more compatible with legacy DAC’s on the market that might not be new enough to do 192kHz. The inputs are all auto-switching, meaning whichever one has a signal present will be switched to.

The rear panel has two small buttons you might find yourself accessing if you plan to use the MB20 in more than one type of situation. We do wish these were on the front panel for easier access, but once you know where they are on the rear, it's pretty easy to get to them by feel. One button switches the unit between transmission mode or receive mode. The other puts it in a low latency mode or high definition mode. Bluetooth does have some latency or delay as some people call it which makes the low latency mode great for some applications we will go over next.

Performance & Use Cases

Most well-made Bluetooth devices have a pretty long-range as long as you do not have a lot of massive walls to go through. In almost all homes, you should be able to get from one side of your home to the other with no dropouts. The MB20 is no different and gave us a solid connection once we were paired up. We even found we could walk out of our store into the parking lot and maintain a solid connection.

Let’s go over some of the potential use cases for the MB20 Bluetooth Transceiver.

The most obvious one is setting it up as a receiver to get streaming music from your smartphone into your audio system. In this case, you make sure the button is in RX mode on the rear and the other is in HD. Then you can simply connect the audio outputs or digital outputs to your system to bring the world of streaming audio into any legacy system.

Another use might be for those of us who enjoy wireless headphones and the freedom they offer to roam around your home or just be cord-free. Here, you would set it up for TX mode and keep the quality setting in HD. With all of the rear connections, there are a multitude of ways to get a signal from your FM tuner, CD player, turntable, or tape deck into the MB20. For most older McIntosh systems, you would simply connect up a tape output that would allow you to choose the source being sent to the MB20. Then, you can walk around your home enjoying the sound from your audio sources on wireless headphones or even a wireless Bluetooth speaker system in another room.

Many of us need a solution to watch TV without disturbing others in the house, which brings up another use case for the MB20. Most TV’s have an optical audio out you could connect up to the MB20 and then transmit the TV sound to your wireless headphones. In this case, you set it to TX and want to put the quality button in LL for low latency to keep the audio in sync with the picture.

It is possible you have two audio systems in different parts of your house and have always wanted a way to connect them. Well, if you purchase a second MB20, you can put one in transmit mode and the other in receive. Then you could send a signal from one system to the other. You will need to make sure the quality button is in the same position on both of them. If you want both systems to play at the same time and you can hear them together, you will want to use low latency mode to keep them in sync, but if you just want to go from one to the other we suggest you use the HD mode.

As you can tell, with so many input and output options, the MB20 is extremely flexible and its use is only limited by your imagination!

Overall Recommendation

As Bluetooth receivers go, the MB20 is at the high end of the price range. But it is built like a McIntosh piece and performs flawlessly. And if you are a McIntosh fan, you typically don’t want any other kind of electronics in your system. We do feel, if you only wanted to stream music into an older system, there are some other component options from Sonos and Bluesound that can give you a wired connection and better performance. These do cost more though and do not have the transmit option like the MB20 does. We think most users will find the MB20 is a great way to get into the world of streaming and also use it with their wireless headphones for TV, audio sources, or both. In that respect, there is nothing on the market like it with the high-tech DAC’s found in the MB20. Once again, the engineering team in Binghamton, NY has come up with a winner!

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