McIntosh MEN220 Room Correction System

Make the Room Work With Your System

You can invest in exceptional speakers, amplification and source components and still have one major variable standing between you and the sound you're looking for:

The room.

Walls, floors, ceilings, furniture, speaker placement and even the shape of the space can dramatically influence what reaches the listening position.

The McIntosh MEN220 Room Correction System is designed to address that problem electronically. Combining sophisticated RoomPerfect™ room correction, customizable equalization and an adjustable two-way crossover, the MEN220 can optimize a high-performance stereo system around the actual acoustic characteristics of your listening environment.

Instead of forcing the room to accommodate the system, the MEN220 helps the system accommodate the room.

RoomPerfect Room Correction

At the heart of the MEN220 is RoomPerfect, an advanced room-correction technology developed by Lyngdorf Audio.

RoomPerfect analyzes both your loudspeakers and the acoustic behavior of your room. Using measurements taken within the listening space, the system develops corrections intended to reduce the room's negative influence while preserving the sonic character of your speakers.

That's an important distinction.

The objective isn't to make every speaker sound the same. It's to allow your speakers to perform more effectively in your specific room.

More Freedom With Speaker Placement

Ideal speaker placement and practical speaker placement aren't always the same thing.

Maybe your speakers need to sit closer to a wall.

Maybe the room isn't perfectly symmetrical.

Maybe the ideal acoustic position puts a speaker somewhere nobody actually wants it.

RoomPerfect gives you considerably more flexibility by accounting for the interaction between the speakers and their surroundings.

The MEN220 can compensate for placement against walls, placement farther into the room and even asymmetric positioning relative to the listening area.

For real-world living spaces, that's a major advantage.

Optimize Up to Eight Listening Positions

A listening room isn't always built around one chair.

The MEN220 can accommodate correction for up to eight individual listening positions, making it possible to optimize performance for multiple seats within the room.

When critical listening is the priority, you can concentrate correction around a specific listening position.

When you're entertaining or listening from different locations, Global Room Correction provides a more balanced presentation throughout the room.

That makes the MEN220 equally interesting for a dedicated two-channel listening room and a high-end system located in a shared living space.

Custom EQ When You Want It

RoomPerfect handles the acoustic correction, but McIntosh also gives you control over the final tonal presentation.

The MEN220 includes six preset EQ curves designed for different types of music and listening preferences.

You can also create and store up to six custom EQ profiles.

That means room correction doesn't take away your ability to personalize the system.

You can optimize the system for the room first—and then decide how you want it to sound.

Built-In Two-Way Crossover

The MEN220 goes beyond room correction by incorporating an adjustable two-way electronic crossover.

This makes it particularly useful for more sophisticated system configurations, including bi-amplified loudspeaker systems.

With two pairs of outputs, the MEN220 can divide the audio spectrum and route the appropriate frequencies to separate amplifiers.

That gives system designers another level of control over speaker and amplifier integration without requiring a separate external crossover component.

Balanced and Unbalanced Connectivity

The MEN220 is designed to integrate easily into serious two-channel systems.

Both balanced XLR and unbalanced RCA inputs and outputs are provided, making it compatible with a wide range of preamplifiers and power amplifiers.

In a typical system, the MEN220 is placed between the preamplifier and power amplifier.

For more advanced installations, its multiple outputs and crossover functionality allow considerably more sophisticated system architectures.

Three Ways to Control It

Despite the amount of processing happening inside, day-to-day operation is straightforward.

The MEN220 can be controlled through its:

Front panel controls
Included remote control
Web-based interface

McIntosh Power Control connections also allow the MEN220 to power on and off in sync with other compatible McIntosh components.

Once the system has been properly measured and configured, RoomPerfect can simply become part of the way you listen.

Room Correction vs. Traditional Equalization

The MEN220 and McIntosh MQ112 solve related problems in very different ways.

The MQ112 is a hands-on analog equalizer. You listen, make adjustments yourself and directly control individual frequency bands.

The MEN220 takes a measurement-based approach.

RoomPerfect analyzes the loudspeakers and room and calculates corrections based on the acoustic environment.

Neither philosophy is inherently right for every system.

For someone who enjoys manually tuning by ear and wants to remain in the analog domain, the MQ112 is extremely appealing.

For someone dealing with significant room interactions—or who wants sophisticated correction across multiple listening positions—the MEN220 is the more powerful tool.

Classic McIntosh Design

The MEN220 may contain sophisticated digital processing, but visually it's unmistakably McIntosh.

A black glass front panel, illuminated McIntosh logo, rotary controls and push buttons give it the familiar McIntosh appearance, allowing it to integrate naturally alongside McIntosh preamplifiers, amplifiers and source components.

The technology can be complicated.

Using it doesn't have to be.

The Grid's Take on the McIntosh MEN220

You can spend a tremendous amount of money upgrading electronics trying to fix a problem that isn't actually coming from the electronics.

Sometimes it's the room.

That's why the MEN220 can make such a meaningful difference in the right system.

RoomPerfect isn't simply a tone control. It measures how the speakers interact with the listening environment and develops corrections around what is actually happening acoustically in that space.

And the ability to optimize up to eight listening positions, create custom EQ profiles and incorporate an adjustable two-way crossover makes the MEN220 much more than a basic room-correction box.

For us, the key is proper setup.

A product like the MEN220 becomes considerably more valuable when it's integrated as part of the complete system rather than simply inserted between two components.

At The Grid HiFi & Home Theater, we can integrate and configure the MEN220 as part of a complete two-channel system, including speaker placement, room optimization, amplification and final system setup.