I accept that Linn did look after their customers whilst at the same time exploiting them mercilessly with 'upgrades'. However, the way they bullied their dealers into not stocking competitors' products (especially Pink Triangle at the time), forcing Naim amplifiers on their dealers (until of course, Linn started with their own amps) and their frankly stupid campaign against CD put my and others backs up against them. Didn't much care for their advertising either. I had a Linn Sondek, bought in 1976, as I was taken in by all the hype at the time, and whilst it was well engineered, it performed no better than any number of competitors.
Ivor also had an unfortunate reputation for the way he treated Hamish Robertson at Ariston. But then no worse I suppose than the way Harold Leak treated Jack Dinsdale over the Tobey-Dinsdale amplifier design.
S.
Hamish Robertson's Rd11 design was already heavily cribbed from the Thorens TD150, albeit 'blueprinted' a bit and which shares many dimensions, especially the top plate, which sits exactly in an LP12 plinth and sharing suspension layout almost exactly. Platter dimensions have diverged very slightly though and the Thorens and Linn platters barely fit, but they're only off by a few thou it seems...
Umm - a few UK dealers were able to stock the Roksan Xerxes too, which in many ways sonically, was way ahead of the game if we did but know it and we had the Townshend Rock II, which again was a far more neutral and honest record spinner, again if we did but know it back then. Max T was a real character and I liked him a lot and I do believe his heart was basically in the right place under the uber-sales spiel: he freely did a Rock/Excalibur/Decca-Podded Gold vs CD of a given disc he also had a master tape copy of and he readily admitted to us and demonstrated the cheap Philips CD player we used (I think it was a CD371), sounded all but identical to the vinyl player which cost four times as much...
Also Serge, we in our two-store environment, never forced Naim on anyone, the potential customers basically asked for the brand, or went elsewhere for alternatives from Exposure, or upgrades to Krell and so on. Our sales director was a HUGE Naim disciple however, but even he couldn't stop the rest of us in the staff buying Linn and later, Nakamichi amps (the CA7 preamp was gorgeous inside and out with a great phono stage for the time and the Stasis-descended PA7 at half the price of the cheapest Krell, was a power house to be reckoned with (all those output transistors per channel!). Mk1 Nak power amps could drift but I gather this was sorted in mk2s and mk1s can be modified accordingly.
To this day, I keep an LK1 as a cheap MC phono stage (which needs regular power-ups to prevent the 'christmas tree' display due to an unobtainium replacement control board (battery leakage in former ownership) and a surprising LK280 with huge SPARK power supply. Stereophile tested the standard pair with iffy results and Choice were similarly iffy about the original LK2 power amp, but I discovered that the LK1 can work really well with 'exuberant sounding' power amps (I cite UK made Audiolab 8000P as a candidate here) as it's not too constrained at the frequency extremes used this way. The 'quietly confident sounding' LK280/SPARK, seems fine with a less band limited and more 'neutral' preamp. Put the two together and the sound is too 'contrived and grainy' remember folks, this is ancient history when amps really did sound different at many volume levels!
Linn's current amps have none of this 'character' I understand, but for the sources and preamps, the early 'Briliant' smps they fitted, all seem to go awol after a number of years and apparently, the damage a blow up causes can progress to the main boards too there's a great video of an engineer, armed with Linto smps repairs, tackles a Karik CD player and spends seemingly hours tracing and replacing a host of components in the supply as well as the supply side of the main board. Linn don't want to know about the LK-era products now however.
Not sure how many UK dealers they have now, but I don't think it's many now as the products are so darned expensive these days.
