Not sure I bought the Linn in a Rolls mindset
and I am quite a bit far from that mindset in the rest of my life as well. What I purchased was a Linn preamp / amp combo (Akurate DSM + Akurate 2200) for around 10.000 EUR - a bit below list price at the time, I guess my reseller see enough business potential in me to be "nice". That's probably significantly lower than what the same combination would cost in the US currently, but I did also pay around 2000 EUR for the board upgrade last year. I also considered McIntosh, but in that case, the European prices were very significantly above US prices. I would not pay the US list price today for that DSM.
My main goal back then was to have a
decent and
reliable Amp/Preamp combo. Streaming, DAC, HDMI, Phono were secondary but welcome (I owned a bunch of other cheap and not so cheap stuff already). I considered and listened to
Devialet (discarded because the single box approach would not make much sense for future eventual power amps upgrades, listening tests varied between firmwares!),
McIntosh (ultimately would have been more expensive than Linn),
Naim (lots of reliability issues reported on the net), audiophile line of
Marantz (unsure about them),
NAD (the big digital amps weren't yet released back then),
Audio Analogue,
Audio Research (could not deliver bass into the Gyia G3 for some reason) and finally settled on the DSM as an apparently reliable and polyvalent preamp/dac/streamer and the Linn amp as a supposedly ideally matched power stage. To some extent, my options were also limited by what I could see and hear locally. I guess I could have gone for something like a nice integrated and a combination of (cheaper but well performing) bits and pieces, possibly for half the price, yes, but that would have meant a less clear upgrade path and tons of plugs and/or power bricks.
Incidentally I would love to see Amir test the Linn power amplifier too. Just out of curiosity.