Linn - love it /hate it/don't care I'll argue anyway thread!

Pioneer P3
Technics SP10
Trio L07D
JVC QLY7
Yamaha GT2000
Denon DP100
Sony PSX9
Marantz TT1000
Aiwa LP3000
Sanyo TP1000
Hitachi HT860
Luxman PD444
Onkyo PX100M
Sansui SR929
Nakamichi TX1000

Were Akai the only large Japanese brand that didn't have a Linn beating direct drive turntable?

 

Hopefully the Cyrus 1 and MF A1 were similarly transformed later

The SP10 was expensive as you say, but anyone listening to one today, or a Micro, the better (and a lot cheaper) Pioneers, Denons and others can only conclude that something was very adrift in the press back then.

 

I recognise a good half a dozen of those being ripped to shreds in the mags at the time.
Different story today and they are well received and exchange hands for serious money.

The prevailing opinion then and now is so different that one must be very wrong!

 

Then as now it comes down to what you like....

Back in '76 I had been running two Technics 1100-As. One with an SME 3009 II /V-15 III and one with the fabulous looking EPA-110 tonearm loaded with another V-15 as well.

Our shop manager had just come back from CES with this ridculous looking TT that really did look like it was built in a garage especially with the KMAL arm atop and had just finished setting it up in the big sound room when I walked in. After hooking it up he asked me if I'd like to hear it. I asked him if he was kidding and if it was some sort of toy or bottom-of-the-line turntable the shop might consider carring. He just grinned and dropped the stylus down on a record. After the record side was over and I had picked my jaw up off the floor...I begged him to sell me the demo but he wouldn't as he wanted all the regulars to get a chance at hearing the thing. IIRC, my new Lp-12 arrived a week or so later and the shop ended up with an extra 1100-A on dem.

Anyway...no tune dem existed back then, no banter, no head-nodding, no fish tales and no Ivor T as a legend...no one here in the States had any idea what a "Linn" was - the damn thing simply out-performed everything we could throw at it.

A decade later the same thing happened to me all over again with the Karik/Numerik and a decade after that, the Naim CDS. Neither of these will be very well thought of on these hifi forums but who cares? I'm right and everyone else is wrong;-)



Big and sexy buts sounds like a squashed toad

 

I wonder where our subjectivist friend would be were it not for Linn and NAim breaking the stranglehold over the industry that the measurement first brigade had at the time?

Seems strange that those who initially allowed to express a marketing position that was contrary to what had gone before were only able to do so because of the ground work done by the flat earth brands- Yet they claim there 'done in' by the same...

 

The change process was already under way, a number of people were involved in it including the mags. I was trying to instigate it at UK Acoustic Research with a little success. The leaders in it were the Haymarket mags, basically because the technically literate and test gear owning reviewers charged so much for their services, Haymarket saw cost saving by using enthusiastic young hacks, who were cheap. Just think how many Haymarket Hi-Fi titles there were in those days.

All Linn did was hi-jack the process because the time was ripe. No matter how good the marketing or how convincing the bullshit and brainwash, if the time isn't right very few fish will bite.

To begin with I welcomed the process until I realised what a control freak IT was and wouldn't be happy until he controlled the whole thing, well for a while he did, that is the problem.

 

HFA was over Linn by 1981, I think Popular a little later. Didn't it metamorphose into New Hifi Sound?

And Practical Hifi may have had a few moments, I recall Paul Benson writing a rather good music column for them.

But the question really is, why was all the money in the late 80s going to esoteric American hifi rather than Japanese? It's nothing to do with Linn/Naim strong-arming the media, because the big circulation mags had moved on by 1982. Is Ricardo not as guilty as Ivor?

FWIW my SP10 isn't comparable to an LP12, the LP12 is a record player with a lid and feet. The SP10 is a turntable. Every installation will sound different because the plinth, isolation and arm mounting are all going to be unique. Fabulous piece of engineering though.

Paul

 

Ricardo didn't screw the industry, he just screwed his customers, but in his defence his type of customer doesn't really care if they are being screwed.

 

Audio in the UK is apt to be pushed and pulled down strange alleys. After the Flat Earth thing, there was the Voyd/Audio Innovations/Snell thing, then the A400 thing, then the Well-Tempered/Shahinian thing, then the Audio Analogue Puccini thing, then the Garrard thing, the Squeezebox thing, the Leben and Harbeth thing...

And now, judging by Whittlebury Hall, the dCS/VTL/Focal thing, all on those wibbly wobbly plastic stands from the Audio Works.

Why can't people just enjoy music without having to make it a party political broadcast?

 

Popular Hi-fi were very pro Linn until their last issue.

HFA was still very pro Linn in the issues I read up to 1983.

 

Agreed, but those are just fads when compared with the FE eighties.

 

I always quote the Linn thing as a brainwash, and in some ways that was literally true. I don't know if it was deliberate but the whole Linn factory visit thing was one long session of NLP (neuro linguistic programming). Because of my training in my other business I recognise it for what it was when I was subject to some of it at a brief visit to the old factory.

Everyone, especially to do with magazines and their marketing were invited to Glasgow. The reviewer conversion was due to this if they were susceptible, others did it from self interest in what ever way turned them on.

In the end the converts acted with almost cult devotion.

 

No argument there..