Ivor Tiefenbrun has always been passionate about music. Sent out by his wife to buy much-needed furniture for their first flat, he came back with a hi-fi. He bought an expensive turntable and speakers but was deeply disappointed by the sound quality — he could only listen to music for a couple of hours, before wanting to turn it off.

Ivor was also a keen engineer and he made an interesting discovery: the music sounded better when he put the speakers in a different room from the turntable. He found this rather puzzling. How could the speakers interfere with the turntable? He decided to explore this further and so began a 40-year old love affair with music systems.

Precision Engineering

The answer lay in the quality of the engineering. The turntable was so badly designed and made, it was affected by the vibrations from the speakers. The only solution was to go back to basics.

Ivor redesigned the turntable from first principles using precision-engineered components to ensure a constant speed and minimum distortion. The result was the Sondek LP12 turntable. It was a revolutionary design backed by new levels of manufacturing quality, with parts made to the same standards required for aerospace.

The Sondek LP12 was launched in 1972. It introduced the music world to unique features, such as the patented single-point bearing which inspired the Linn logo. More importantly, it retrieved more music from a record than any other turntable on the market, then and now. You only had to listen to hear the difference.

This set a standard for Linn which still holds true today. We don’t just design outstanding products; we build them to the most exacting standards, sometimes to within 0.001 mm. It’s about accuracy, consistency and reliability.

Source First

Back in the early 70s, the conventional wisdom was that sound quality was determined by good or bad speakers. The experts believed the hi-fi chain started with the speakers and worked down to the source of the music, which at that time was the turntable. Ivor proved the opposite to be true — that the source of the music was the most important.

Ivor took to the road with his new precision-engineered Sondek LP12 and demonstrated the difference to everyone who would listen. He could put the LP12 with their cheapest speakers and it would still out-perform any other turntable and speakers combination. The LP12 sounded so much better, it started a revolution — in thought, design and performance.

Children of the Revolution

No matter how good the amplifiers or loudspeakers, you can’t get back what has already been lost. Quite simply, information lost at the source is lost forever. In computing it’s known as Garbage In, Garbage Out; but it means the same thing. This seems perfectly sensible to us now. But then we’re all children of the revolution.

Ivor didn’t set out to build a business; he simply wanted to listen to great music at home. But inspired by the musical improvements he achieved with the LP12, he established Linn Products with the aim of increasing the quality of sound all the way from the microphone to the ear.

Ivor’s son Gilad joined Linn in 2003 with the dream of creating a digital music player which would do for digital what his father’s LP12 had done for analogue: revolutionise the source by eliminating the weakest link.

The rise and fall of disc players

The launch of the iconic CD12 in 1999 proved that Linn could excel at both analogue and digital music players. But as good as the CD12 was, it was held back by the limitations of the compact disc format. The new CDs were easy to use and heavily marketed, but in truth there was far less information on a CD than vinyl or 8-track tape.

Linn supported the emergence of disc formats such as Super Audio CD (SACD) and High Definition CD (HD-CD) because they offered better audio quality than the standard CD. We launched the Unidisk as an ''all-formats' disc player and began to release Linn Records music in these higher quality formats.

SACD offered higher quality than the standard CD but it never really took off. Not much music was released and most people didn’t own a SACD player. SACD was a proprietary Sony technology and their tight control and high licensing costs made it difficult for both manufacturers and customers to enjoy the benefits.

As head of R&D at Linn, Gilad experienced first-hand the difficulties involved in supporting a 'closed' proprietary format during the Unidisk launch. Despite the massive investment made in SACD by Linn and other manufacturers and labels, they were wholly reliant on Sony to correct problems within the SACD platform itself. Gilad resolved never again to put faith in a proprietary disc-based format that required specialised hardware. Instead, he started to think about a new type of music player that wasn’t tied to one particular disc or format but would fully realise the potential of digital music...a digital LP12.

Gilad’s dream was a music player that would play all digital music and make everything sound better, a digital LP12. The only way to create this was to build a system from scratch, using open standards and formats to create something designed specially for music and engineered to last.

From discs to downloads

By 2002, Linn Records were recording music at increasingly higher quality in order to capture every last detail.

The logical step was to create a standalone music player that was capable of playing this higher resolution music and design it to work on a standard home network. Building it for the 'open' network rather than a proprietary system would ensure it worked alongside the growing number of networked products and make it easier for anyone to get started.

We developed a streaming platform from scratch that would allow music to be pulled from the network rather than read from a drive within the player itself. Sound quality improved greatly and there would be no reliance on particular discs or formats — music could be ripped to a hard drive from any disc or downloaded from the internet at any resolution.

The growth of broadband meant most homes already had a home network and faster download speeds were available to download better than CD-quality music directly from linnrecords.com. These new Studio Master files were too large to be stored on a normal CD anyway.

Klimax DS was launched in 2007 and proved that Linn DS sounded better than any CD or digital player available.