Linn uphorik review

May as well post it here as well for those who don't frequent PFM or the WW.


I wasn't particularly looking for a new phonostage, I quite fancied trying the new DAC from the guy who makes the Hiface if truth be told. But here's the thing, once I started looking at DACs, spurred on by the never ending development of John Westlake's latest projects, now to become Audiolab products, i thought it would make sense to put a bit of cash aside. Before I had realised it, a bit, had become quite a bit. Of course the money pile exists, but neither of the dac/cd's I'm looking at are ready yet- there's an Async USB joke in there somewhere.

I acquired a Benz LP a couple of month back to go with a recently-ish purchased SME 10 and V. These were still plugged into a DIY phonostage based on the guts on the Naim 323 cards. The remote power supply for these comprises a 200VA transformer feeding a HackerCap rectifier board, feeding Q speed diodes and Mundorf caps, this gives up two rails to the phonostage which has locally mounted SuperTeddyregs inside the box. The cards are modded as follows. All the small signal polcarbonate caps have been replaced with polystyrenes, some gert big ones at that. The power rail decoupling electrolytic has been replaced with 10uf WIma MKP and the ERO feedback cap replaced with Silmics and .1 teflon bypasses. The zener circuit has been removed due to the presence of local regulation and the loading resistors changed for Charcrofts. Frankly it sounds bloody good, and so it should. Which leads us to.

So I'm sat wasting some time on Ebay thinking I'll just look at the Phonostages. hoping as ever to find that elusive bargain that no one else noticed, a diamond in the rough, that misspelt gem in the worng category and woefully underpriced with a BIN of £30. I didn't find it. But I did see a Linn Uphorik for £1350. Now that sound s like fair money to me, decent 2nd hand price, worth a punt and move it on without a loss if it doesn't fit. What's more he's local and he's happy with cash on collection. Ahh bugger it I'm in. Deal done, paid for, collected and installed.

and it looks like this- from the outside



I'm neither here nor there over the looks, it's a plain grey box with a moderately shapely front panel. it's not going to offend anyone and I doubt it's going to appear in MOMA either, ( not until being blinded by the worlds brighest blue LED becomes an artform- one which Linn have sewn up already I should mention).

Around the back you'd see seperate inputs for MM and MC as well as single ended and balanced outputs. These hint at the circuit being dual mono and having each channel split into MM or MC gain stages and shared RIAA for each channel. (Not unlike the little Cambridge Audio 640p in fact). Sure enough once you open it up and peel back the heavy shielding plates that cover each channel that's exactly what you will see. The shielding plates are worth a look on there own, Linn have gone to quite some effort to keep the radio nasties out- a sensible move some would say when you are employing a switch mode power supply in the same case.



The shielding plates are worth a look on there own, Linn have gone to quite some effort to keep the radio nasties out- a sensible move some would say when you are employing a switch mode power supply in the same case. I do find it curious however that while they dutifully twist the wires to the LED they don't bother doing the same for those comeing from the Brilliant supply itself.

Flexibility?



One area where the Uphorik does stand out against previous Linn stages is in its flexibility, you have multiple gain, resistive and capacitive loadings available for MM, LO MC and HO MC. I think if it had been me doing the choices of values for this I might have considered a bit more a spread. MC carts that need loading between 25-100 ohms are well catered for, theres a couple of option above 100 and under 1k, but theres nothing over 1k. For my Benz LP that's a bit of a bugger, because it absolutely sounds best running into 47k. Fortunately for me, Linn were forward thinking enough to leave a coupe of solder pads spare inside to allow you to override the loading switch and solder your own in directly. (Or if you are a typical numpty, pay your dealer a disproportionate amount for 30 seconds of soldering).

Circuit central.



Nicely done, you must agree. All beautifully laid out surface mount componentry, apart from those caps. Good looking ground planes, a multi layer board, very nicely executed. But holy shit, did they win first price at the eat all you like Op-amp contest at TI last year. There's 14, yes 14, count em, op-amps for each channel. I've seen mixing desks with less. Admittedly, they are all single channel devices so it's not such a silicon fest as it first seems.



A closer look at the circuit for 1 channel shows it laid out into 4 sections, Active RIAA, Power supply, MM and MC gain stages. It is all rather neatly done very workmanlike. But of course this is all just starter to the main course- what does it actually sound like. The Superline beater, the best phonostage Linn have ever made etc etc do the plaudits really stack up to the sound when you take it outside of a Linn dealer and the salivating expectation of a Linnie in an all Linn environment?

Well, does it?

 

I guess I need to get this out of the way first, i'm not a Linnie, i'm not a Naimy, I only own two components made by the same brand and that's the V arm and model 10 deck that I use from SME. I don't subscribe to any 'school' of audio, I know that like many I think I'm after Hifidelity, but I know the truth is that i like things based on a combination of how they sound and how they look.

I'd happily give the Uphorik shelf space in my system, it's looks neither enhance the sound or put me off it. It's practical, well featured, flexible, sounds good and does what a phonostage should, and it does it without the slightest hint of hum, whoosh or RF breakthrough. Unlike Lefties experience with the Superline the Uphorik appears, in my room at least, to be utterly impervious to RF nasties. So it should, if you take a look at the internal shots above you will see a number of small ferrites and inductors on each and every input and output, these block any incoming RF and I expect do the same job at keeping anything leaking out from the Birlliant power supply. Here the thing though, I think I can hear a difference between having it switched on in my system even when not playing. I haven't tested this, and it might be more to do with my preference for well designed and regulated linear power supplies over SMPS's rather than any actual effect, but it's a niggling doubt that I can't shift.

With that in mind how does it sound? It sounds great, the closest I can reference it to is the Doug Self phonostage sold on ebay that I was able to borrow for a couple of weeks. It is incredibly quiet in operation, almost utterly quiet even with the volume wicked right up on the highest gain setting their is only the merest hint of rustle at the speakers. That knocks my DIY NAim 323 effort into a cocked hat, that sounds like a blind man shopping at a brown paper store with the volume turned right up. The Linn stage at 64db gain is about as noisy as my Naim cards with the volume wound halfway on my pre- truly excellent noise performance.

The low background noise does allow the Uphorik to paint you a very deep picture in terms of scale, it excels in highlighting the differences between the quietest and loudest of sounds and handles the transitions between the two better than my 323 stage. It really does swing between crescendo and diminuendo effortlessly. While able to do this trick of scale I don't think it has the same very low level resolving power that my 323 stage has, I don't think its ultimate small scale resolution is as tight, which runs contrary to the expectation based on the low noise levels. Sure it's blacks are blacker, but it's finest shade of grey isn't as fine. I'm struggling to describe this well, it does scale better, it has less noise, but it genuinely doesn't pick up the finest detail in the same way. I'm not talking a big difference, but a noticeable one none the less.

It's a very cohesive sounding phonostage, there's a great sense of solidity to the way it replays music and musicians seem to play together as a whole more than they do on my other phonostage. I'm not sure how it manages this trick but there's a better sense of interplay between different threads, this is particularly noticeable on smaller scale ensemble pieces, especially jazz where it simply takes my other stage to the cleaners. But it's not all one way traffic for the Uphorik. While the Uphorik has greater bass extension and authority than my other stage it has less texture and definition towards the bottom end. There's an apparent lack of reverb from inside the kick drum, and the sense of skin rebounding from pedal on several different tracks. it's just not as well resolved at the bottom end as my current stage; a feature I attribute to op-amp driven circuits based on my experience with the D.self design and my own CA640p.

It doesn't entire have things it's own way at the top end as well. But to be honest i'm not sure this isn't down to the lack of a suitable loading for my Benz LP which prefers to be run wide open in 47k, the Uphorik maxes out at 1k for MC loading. I currently run my Naim stage loaded at 10k not wishing to 'waste' the pair of 47k Charcroft resistors which I'm aiming to keep back for the last phonostage I ever buy- which is what i hoped the Uphorik might be. So given this slight potential mismatch I still find that the Uphorik doesn't resolve quite the level of intimacy than the 323 stage does. I don't find it matches the texture and instrumental timbre as closely to my expectations as the 323 stage does. Given that i have quite a bit music shared across cd and vinyl that came from the same digital masters it's easy to check, the 323 stages is matched more closely by the best digital, they are in agreement with each other while the Uphorik is out on a limb. For me this is a big issue, that's why I buy vinyl, for what i consider to be its often better rendition of high frequency timbre. I have some 192khz 24bit classical violin from 2l.no that matches my best vinyl pound for pound, but the quality of the rest of my digital classical music is nowhere near this well recorded and resolved- if only it were.

So the Uphorik doesn't have it all its own way. It does deeper bass with more slam and authority, but it doesn't have the subtlety of detail and ultimate low level resolution. Yet at the same time it does scale and dynamic swings far better than my current stage. It is a supremely quiet phonostage with almost no audible noise even on high gain, but balanced against this is what I hear as being slightly more coarse instrumental texture and timbre that doesn't replicate the identifiable sounds of real instruments as accurately. It provides a much greater sense of the 'band' than my own stage, giving more cohesion, but this is delivered against the loss of some of the finer more 'hifi' attributes.

So for me it's not a slam dunk. A quick summation is that it's more musical and less hifi than what i currently have. But what i currently have has the benefit of having been developed and fitted into my system over a 12 month+ period and tuned to match the rest of my system. The Uphorik has shown me that I can certainly improve further in what I have, and hopefully there's a phonostage out there that can bring what the Uphorik excels at without stealing away any of the benefits of my current stage. I would have loved to soldered in my 47k resistors and heard the cart running into its ideal load, but sadly I wish to leave this unsullied as it's headed back out into the wider 2nd hand market, I'm sure that would have redressed the balance at least a little regarding the top end response.

£1350, is a good 2nd hand price for a very good phonostage, i'm sure there are many people out there who will be simply bowled over by its obvious strengths. My search however goes on.

 

Hmm...I wonder why the picture links show and not just the picture (oh, is it because of the Wam link - they may not be accessible to non Wam members).

That apart, excellent revue and outstanding pics .

 

Not sure the <IMG> tags are correct. Guess i needed to use the image link feature.

 

Very nice looking thing.

Are all of those op amps in circuit all of the time or is the count so high because they cover all inputs, outputs and options?

 

These days Linn's philosophy seems to be that any problem can be solved with a complicated enough circuit and the more complex the better.

 

Depends on your viewpoint.

Mine is that so long as what emerges from the output is correct, I don't care how we got there. So 2 op amps or 50, valves or transistor, IC or discrete - mix of any. Outcomes matter.

I see audio components as machines built to do a task. With electronics we can establish what perfection looks like (or should look like) in most cases, and with that as the goal we can determine good or bad performance.

 

I didn't make any real effort to trace out the circuit Rob so I'd only really be judging based on the images you see above. It appears to be active RIAA, power rails x 2, Lo-MC gain stage, then MC and MM gain stages. There's 14 op-amps per channel. So worst case scenario using Lo-MC you go through 11 single channel op amps. Best case using MM you run through 7.

It does seem like rather a lot of op-amps. All things being different I'll take the stage with the fewest parts if they measure the same.

The two units did sound quite different once you homed in on their particular traits, the Uphorik being a little mechanical in tone but more robust and my stage having a little more texture at the expense of authority.

More a side grade than an upgrade- it'll be heading back onto ebay tomorrow

 

I take that back Rob the bottom four aren't they are ST eZ936 (no hit on their website so I guess that's a mask name for Linn)

So it's 3 for MM or 7 for MC

 

Hmm...well I have some understanding of 'machines' and in my world the use of unnecessarily complex solutions is both inelegant and inefficient.

 

Yes, if the simpler solution gives the same or better result.

 

I agree, though you most recent statement seems to contradict your earlier position.

 

As a designer, you can build a perfectly good phono stage with a couple of op amps and 4 transistors or you can throw the kitchen sink at it as with the Linn.
From the designers perspective, the former is probably more attractive.
For the end user, who cares if it performs correctly and the price is right.

If i were building one from scratch (which I am as it happens) I'll be keeping it simple since I don't see any real benefit from something more complex in terms of sonics. it depends what you want the thing to do of course. If you want lots of adjustability and the ability to take MM and MC, have SE and balanced outputs then it will clearly complicate the circuit.
I'm simply saying that the complexity needn't mean it sounds worse.

 

I'd love to give that a listen when it's completed Rob, nail it shut though, eh?

 

Yes, obviously, if you are going to review it

 

54-60db of gain with 1k loading minimum for me please.