Nah. They have mostly looked liked a design identity crisis to me. One thing is that you can always tell which brand it is from afar.
Mac, at least up through the early digital age, was a straightforward, no nonsense company that was laser focused. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Mac never made a record player. They never made a cassette or open reel deck. They made a few amplifiers, an integrated amplifier, a tuner and tuner/preamp combo, and a preamp. A couple of models of each type. Also, loudspeakers dealers could sell, but no one really cared much about.
They had a kind of 'sub-brand' that sold an outsourced receiver, called Stereotech, I think. And a bonafied McIntosh receiver that was not really branded as a McIntosh, but everyone knew what it was.
Also, what they made stayed in the catalog for longer than most other company's products. Oh...and one year, late '50s I think, they offered an amplifier kit.
McIntosh was really the high-end, before it became 'tweaky', care of Bill Johnson and, later, Mark Levinson. Back in the early days, Mac's price competition was whatever Saul Marantz built, prior to the Superscope buyout.
You didn't find many 'mainstream' Mac reviews in the hi-fi press, because the company really saw no upside in sending in review samples. Julian Hirsch would measure THD and watts; Len Feldman would measure selectivity, capture ratio and stereo separation. At their price point, McIntosh couldn't compete with the Japanese on watts, and by the late '70s sophisticated Japanese tuners were as good as an MR-78 (unless you lived nextdoor to Richard Modafferi, with his unusual reception problems).
Mac gear was more expensive than most anything else-- never sold via mail-order or offered with a MSRP discount. What Mac sold was dealer support. A McIntosh dealer would set you straight, hold your hand, do the installation if needed, repair your unit if it broke and offer you a loaner if you needed one. Then, once a year your dealer would conduct a 'clinic' in order to measure your gear, assuring you that your item met its published specs. And offer you a snack while you waited. At any time, your dealer would inspect your diamond stylus with an expensive stereo microscope that Mac made their dealers buy, in order to offer an additional level of service.
So that was what you got for your extra dollars. Hirsch or Feldman couldn't quantify the Mac total package experience in their respective magazine's pages. Today all (or most) of that is gone.
As far as the 'underground' went? Those guys never said a good word about McIntosh. The brand was viewed as a stodgy hold-over from the past. I remember Gordon Holt writing (paraphrasing) that Mac was never going to be on Stereophile's radar. An early iteration of Peter Aczel wrote that he didn't even know anyone who owned McIntosh, and he wasn't going to buy one for review because no one he knew would then want to buy it, even at a discount... and what the hell was he going to do with it, then? How things change.
I guess McIntosh thinks they have to sell bling in today's marketplace. They know their market and customers better than I. But I do know from observation that today's Mac is has little to do with legacy Mac. That much is certain. Do they still offer a 'special' kind of value? I suppose you can say that compared to something like Boulder, McIntosh is dirt cheap. And you don't even get bling with a Boulder preamp.
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