McIntosh XR240
Overview
What the record actually shows for the McIntosh XR240 is a speaker that lived most of its documented life in the back pages of the audio magazines — specifically, in the used-gear listings of Audio Classics, the Walton, New York dealer whose classifieds ran month after month in Audio. That is an odd kind of afterlife for a McIntosh loudspeaker, but it tells you something useful: the XR240 was a real, sold, traded, and collected product, and the surviving paper trail is mostly about what people paid for one secondhand rather than what a reviewer heard in a listening room.
The strongest evidence of the model's identity comes from Audio (September 1990, p.27), which ran a feature on "The McIntosh XR 240 and XR 230 — Two New Speaker Designs." That piece pairs the two models as a launch, and it discusses the engineering concerns behind the design: keeping moving parts to a minimum, controlling independent vibration modes, and supplying the required force down to 20 Hz, described there as the lowest operating frequency. The same article notes that the upper woofer's operating range ends where its radiation becomes directional, above which the dividing network takes over. That is the closest thing to a design brief that survives for the XR240, and it establishes the speaker as a multi-way floorstanding design with a crossover doing real work between a lower and an upper driver.
The other documented half of the XR240 story is the walnut XR 230, which appears in the same Audio feature and is identified there as a walnut-finished sibling. Collectors hunting the pair should note that the two models were announced together and were priced apart from one another on the used market — the XR230 consistently traded below the XR240 in the Audio Classics listings.
What the Classifieds Say About Value
For most of the 1990s, the XR240's public price was whatever Audio Classics was asking that month, and the numbers are remarkably consistent. Read those figures together and a pattern emerges: a mint XR240 sat around $1,100–$1,200 through the mid-1990s, with rougher examples dropping into the high hundreds.
Whether that reflects lower production or simply that people held onto the bigger speaker is not documented, and collectors should treat the relative scarcity as an observation from the classifieds rather than a confirmed production figure.
Living With One
The practical case for the XR240 is straightforward: it is a McIntosh floorstander with a documented crossover design and a documented low-frequency target of 20 Hz, and it sells for a fraction of what the blue-meter electronics cost. The practical case against it is that almost nothing about servicing it is documented in the surviving record. Driver part numbers, crossover component values, cabinet dimensions, impedance, sensitivity, and power handling do not appear in any of the source material available here, which means a buyer should expect to evaluate a pair on the bench rather than from a spec sheet. Anyone considering a rebuild should source a service manual before committing, because the Audio (September 1990, p.27) description of the dividing network is conceptual rather than schematic.
The walnut finish on the XR230 sibling is documented; the XR240's finish is not, so buyers should judge cosmetics from photographs rather than assumption. The same caution applies to the drivers — the design description references a lower woofer and an upper woofer with a defined handoff, but the actual complement is unknown from the record.
Verdict
The XR240 is a speaker for the collector who wants a McIntosh floorstander and is comfortable doing the homework. The design intent is documented, the used-market pricing is unusually well documented across five years of dealer listings, and the model is scarce enough to feel like a find. What is missing is the service literature — and for a speaker this old, that gap matters more than any spec. Buy on condition, verify the drivers, and treat the $1,100–$1,200 mint-market figure from the mid-1990s as the historical reference point rather than a current valuation.
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