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Linn AV5125 5-channel Amplifier Review

anmpr1

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Unlike most high end audio companies that specialize in just speakers, or just electronics, Linn does both and with the expectation that dealers will sell entire systems of their brand to their customers.
That's been a long standing marketing approach for some companies. AR did it to include their amp and turntable. McIntosh dealers would push a complete system (sans record player but with nice FM tuner). B&O.

At the 'high end' Mark Levinson always wanted to sell a 'systems' approach--at least from amp to speaker (MLAS, Cello, and his 'bargain basement' Red Rose). Mark never made a record player but would sell you a MC cartridge. He once toyed with the idea of selling refurbed top tier Nakamichi cassette decks and real time cassette duplicates of recordings he'd made on his superduper Studer A80. Nothing came of that idea, at least as far as I know.
 
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amirm

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LTig

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Funny that you mention that, I was playing around with a subwoofer to add some under the 50 Hz the bookshelfs don't play.
It's to big to fit under the desk (legroom) so it sits on my left, on the right is an old floorstander for nostalgic reasons and while playing test tones the woofer in that started to move around at aprox. 40 Hz.
Now short cut the terminal of the old floorstander and try again.
 

elberoth

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There are two amps now listed on ebay for 450 EUR and $599. So I guess this is their current value right now.
 
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amirm

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There are two amps now listed on ebay for 450 EUR and $599. So I guess this is their current value right now.
Good deal, pun intended. I will update the review.
 

Francis Vaughan

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Talk about Linn doing their own thing, existing CPU architectures were not good enough:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv

The Rekursiv was just plain amazing. Some colleagues of mine had one for a while, but it had gone by the time I got to visit. The only version ever built was a daughter card for a Sun 4/260, it used the Sun to provide a persistent file system and general support.
The story is a bit sad, apparently Harland's car was hit by a Linn delivery truck in the company car park, and the company refused to pay, so he spat the dummy and left.

For the geeks, the reason it was called Rekursiv (apart for the fact that Linn products always have a "k" in the name) was that the microcode could recursvily call itself. Which is a pretty astounding idea. Memory managment was in microcode. By which we mean object allocation. If the heap ran out of space, the allocator called garbage collection - still in microcode. Object structure was defined in the microcode. This was the Intel Ipx-432 on steroids. Whether it would have suffered from the same problems we never got to find out. (My thesis included a small commentary on the Rekursiv along with other sadly forgotten architectures like the Symbolics Lisp Machine.) Modern computer science is seriously boring compared to what it was once.
 
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Going wisdom at the time was to make more and more complex CPU instruction sets. Then came the RISC revolution showing that the more complex instructions took longer to execute than simpler set. And with it, ton of instructions sets/CPUs went defunct.
 

anmpr1

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Talk about Linn doing their own thing, existing CPU architecture
I'm architecture agnostic. For my music server I'm holding out till Stallman gets HURD going. That's on the front burner for me... Now, where did I misplace my Discwasher? :facepalm:
 

Francis Vaughan

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I'm architecture agnostic. For my music server I'm holding out till Stallman gets HURD going. That's on the front burner for me... Now, where did I misplace my Discwasher? :facepalm:
Egads. The sun will be cold before the Gnu Hurd ever happens. I remember when the effort started. There were some serious missteps in the way that was run. Linux just steamed past them and never even noticed. Which is a great pity. It could have been very different.
 

Francis Vaughan

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Going wisdom at the time was to make more and more complex CPU instruction sets. Then came the RISC revolution showing that the more complex instructions took longer to execute than simpler set. And with it, ton of instructions sets/CPUs went defunct.
Yeah, all except for one. x86. Which is another great misstep of history.
Curiously the RISC theory does not have the world to itself in performance. Cache performance and in particular pressure on the I cache can make for some interesting effects. Get enough smarts into instruction decode and things can get interesting.
But RISC may still have the last laugh. RISC V and Arm may eventually rule the world. (Although Arm is not exactly a very pure RISC.) RISC V is a sleeper. But will wake.

Anyway, we digress. :)
 

anmpr1

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Linux just steamed past them and never even noticed. Which is a great pity. It could have been very different.
Torvalds was practical and 'agnostic' in his own way. Stallman was 'uncompromising' and completely impractical in his own way. They both were tyrants in their own way. But that's what's needed in a lot of cases. I used to do Web edits for his Free Software Foundation... had some minor interactions with Richard. He always treated me decently. But I really couldn't relate to it. Using Emacs as a 'GUI' and all that! Hardcore man. Hardcore! :cool:
 

simbloke

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O.T.
I think one reason Linux succeeded is that Linus is a pragmatic guy who wasn't aiming for the moon. He also managed to delegate to some good people when he most needed to.
 

t129

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I would love a pair of these for an active setup. Too bad they are not done by a slightly more sensible (read: cheaper) manufacturer but then it wouldn't be as eccentric and interesting. I guess I just coined the point of high end...

I, as I would imagine many others with reasonable speaker sensitivities, usually run things at 0.1-1 Watt rms (but like to have the 100W peak capability for the hypothetical 20dB transient dynamic range) so this is just immensely better than the average avr or multichannel whatnot. Really worthy of a happy panther in the (quite possibly) audible improvement sense.

The high frequency THD would also have been very interesting to see how far poor little tda7293 could be pushed. (The maximum power is already really heavily skirting the thermal limits.) But beggars can't be choosers as they say. If only there was a Tda7293 PCB with a inkling of PCB optimization and separate supplys available so it wouldn't be so damn expensive to spend the hours to do the whole thing myself. DIY audio is just a black hole of a time sink with really twisted, forever tweaking, rewards.
 

PenguinMusic

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Hi guys,

Nice to see those tested here.

I have 3 of those amps fitted with active cards that feed
- 1 pair of Linn Keltik speakers (front) that are active quad-amplified (so 8 channels used for the front speakers) ;
- 1 pair of Linn Kaber speakers (rear) that are active tri-amplified (so 6 channels used) ;
- 1 Linn AV center speaker.

To my ears they sounded really nice and I was indeed able to find all units used for about 450 to 500€, so yes, 600 dollars is the price they go for.

I am quite pleased to see that my subjective ear story is not just "my impression" and that they also measure honestly.

It might be of note that those are 125W/channel, but as soon as they are ALL CHANNELS DRIVEN they go back to 5 X 100W, which given the size and weight of the box is still quite a performance.

Regards.
 

gfx_1

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Now short cut the terminal of the old floorstander and try again.
It looks like it dampens the woofer a bit. Played a test tone from 30-60 Hz 30 seconds long, around the 55-57 Hz mark the woofer created 0,140 Volts at the speaker terminals.
 

milosz

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milosz

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Going wisdom at the time was to make more and more complex CPU instruction sets. Then came the RISC revolution showing that the more complex instructions took longer to execute than simpler set. And with it, ton of instructions sets/CPUs went defunct.
There was a CPU that thought in PASCAL at one time- 1980 or so- Digicomp Research's Pascal-100 board, which ran on the S-100 bus. It used a Digital Equipment Corp. "Pascal Microengine." That whole business was poorly implemented and went exactly nowhere.

I seem to recall that someone was trying to make a CPU that thought in LISP around that same time.
 

PenguinMusic

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"The last known copy of a Rekursiv computer ended up at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde canal in Glasgow." => https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv

All this and an IC-based power amp from the company that claimed the most important component in a hi-fi system in terms of sound quality is the turntable platter bearing.

Hum,

Is that what Linn claims ?

As I remembered at the time they said "Source first".
And to tell that ,they also said : "Whatever the qualities of the pre/amp/speakers, they will never recover a signal that has been lost at the beginning..."

I might be stupid, but that claim does make some sense does it not ?

Regards.
 
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