User review thread

[jammy395]

I dare say Ivor has a good old chuckle to himself every time he claps eye's on his MBE medal...........
Still a shrewd Scotsman of the bit devious variety........

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

As a businessman and a salesman there is no doubting his ability, but as a designer he claims himself to be he couldn't design his way out of a paper bag. The LP12 was designed by "Hamish" Robertson and "acquired" from him by Linn (Castle Engineering as was). The speakers were a strange bunch early on, very characterful and rather shouty but not bland. A classic example of Linn was the Kan. Chartwell Acoustics, a company with the BBC LS3/5a licence went bust, and their cabinet maker was left with large stocks of cabinets. Linn bought them for a song and threw a couple of drivers in with minimal crossover design and Ivor did *a job* on the dealers, and a horrible screechy thing suddenly became the small speaker of choice with the new flat earth dealers. Amps only came about because he decided Naim wouldn't continue to make money from his marketing skills and he fell out badly with JV. But this one fell down a bit as the Naim sound (distortion!) had become "de rigueur" by then and Linn couldn't emulate / copy it.

It really is an example of how not to run an industry and put us at odds with the rest of the world as good and excellent product was by-passed and just not imported here as there was no point as only the discounters and fringe dealers would stock it. The change started with the re-emergence of valves as they were sooo different it almost created a separate market.

[jammy395]

Cheer's Doc intresting reading.
I guess some rather good kit back then must have been ignored as you say....shame.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Mostly good Jap direct drive turntables

[jammy395]

Why cant us Brit's build our own Direct Drive TTs.....
Are they difficult to build - or is it lack of Quartz, for the Quartz lock gubbin's............

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

The production engineering required means very large production runs and no UK company since Garrard would have been capable of it, and to be honest with you Direct Drive was a Jap thing, here we went for idler drive and a good Garrard 301 or 401 or Lenco G99 are nearly the equal of the best Jap DDs just different. Belt drives are very easy to engineer so small runs small companies, they just happen to be not very good at things that are important to me, like speed stability and bass note definition. There is a rumour that someone heard Ivor saying that if he hadn't "acquired" Hamish Robertsons design he would have produced a DD, but knowing him it was probably said just for playing an audience.

For me the best reasonably priced DDs are pre quartz lock clock, like the PL71. They used a flip flop transistor circuit to set the speed, not such rigid stepping smoother transition, but there are arguments both ways.

[terrybooth]

Ah but surely the Lingo sorted out the LP12's bass incapacity
I admit I fell for the magic trick - design a product badly so that you can sell more gubbins to sort out the fundamental shortcomings. Yes, I bought ( still have) a Lingo and, yes, it did sort out bass somewhat. But like all that stuff, satisfaction with the music was short lived. Very soon, the 'improvement' disappeared music started sounding flat and you knew that the only cure to be offered by the Laim pharmacopoeia was another 'upgrade'. I guess I started realising the error of my ways when 'the system' was languishing after a house move, I'd 'moved on' to home cinema (but that's a whole other story) and I found that a tatty little 2.1 system on my PC was my de facto preferred system for listening to music that I could enjoy.

(I really must get round to putting the Lp12 and Lingo it on fleabay).

[jammy395]

Terry you may be pleasently surprised by what you get for them.......
The Flat Earthers still abound.......O the misguided fool's...............

[Lindsayt]

...From 1983 to 2003 my LP12 went from Valhalla, Basik LVX, Rega R100 to Cirkus, Ittok LVIII, Linn K9, Lingo 2.

The Cirkus and Ittok arrived at the same time and bought greater detail and clarity. I could hear details I hadn't heard before.

The Lingo 2? I'm not sure as my Valhalla went sick. So I wasn't able to compare healthy Valhalla vs Lingo 2.

The Rega R100 was a sideways move. Tonally different with the K9 being brighter but no better overall. But a K9 with a new tip beat the R100 with a worn tip hands down. The change was made because I couldn't get a replacement stylus for the R100.

During this period I didn't buy any hi-fi magazines. It was simply a case of upgrading my LP12 from time to time. I was a Popular Hi-fi magazine disciple. No point in upgrading my amp or speakers till I'd maxed out the LP12. No point in trying any other record players nor CD players as the LP12 was "the best sounding source in the world". Ha! Or was it?...


...In 2003 the foam surrounds on my HB1 mid-bass drivers perished. I had recently discovered eBay and saw a pair of Linn Saras for sale. Wow! A chance to buy what had been the 2nd best speakers in the world, according to Popular Hi-fi in 1983, after the Linn Isobariks. I bought them for £175, with stands. And to be honest was not bowled over by them. I instinctively felt that I was missing the dynamics of the HB1's which sounded a bit cruder, but more alive.

I was also conscious of the fact that I had veered away from the Popular Hi-fi upgarde ladder. That I ought to upgrade my front end to do the Saras justice. Ha! What poppycock!

So I bought a 2nd hand Linn Karma, and an EAR834p phono amp due to the Creek CAS4040 being mm only. And an affordable Valve 300b push pull amp to go with the EAR. I really liked the Karma. Nice upgrade over the K9. Smoother. More transparent. With the valve amplification I loved the midrange. Natural. Not synthetic. There were limitations on the maximum volume. There would be a volume when the system would sound "just right". Turn it up beyond that and it'd sound breathless.

I still had the old problem with bass guitars disappearing into the mix or the sludge of the bass on the majority of my records.


My next discovery was pfm, when I googled info on Linn Saras. My whole outlook on hi-fi changed the day that I read the results of a bake-off between an LP12 and 3 inexpensive Japanese direct drive turntables. The LP12 lost miserably and its' owner sold it shortly after the bake-off...

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

We had such a good hi-fi industry here in the 1960's, so many good companies producing good product. They started to suffer in the late 60's and into 70's with Japanese imports, but the Japanese were not interested in the quality of the distributors they appointed, they just wanted box shifters so their distributors relied on the discounter shops like Lasky's and Comet to shift product, so it just went down and down market. This left a lot of small traditional shops empty of product and ripe for a bullshitter like IT, and he with also roping in JV of Naim took advantage of the hole in the market, gave these smaller dealers better profit margins than the Japanese product distributors, banned discounting, and the *business model* that was the flat earth was born. Then they went on an indoctrination / brainwashing campaign with the shop employees and reviewers and potential new dealers and the model extended with new devoted flat earth shops, flat earth magazines with their dedicated flat earth reviewers, so much inertia they became an immovable object blocking up the industry for over 20 years. It was so daft it almost became like a cult religion.

Forget all the musical bullshit associated with it, it was just a very successful brainwashing / marketing scam.