Linn Klimax Solo 800 power amplifier

By: Alan Sircom [hi-fi+ Issue 236]

Most audio companies stay in their lane. They make electronics or turntables or loudspeakers. Some go ultra-specialist and make just one subsection of those fields, such as cartridges or preamplifier.

A few brands make a complete system. But only Linn makes full-on audio ecosystems. And the dif culty with making a complete ecosystem is ‘point of entry’. In the high-end, there are many outstanding loudspeakers out there that were outside of Linn’s purview because the company didn’t make a power amplifier with the gravitas and muscle to drive them; Linn cracked that nut with the Klimax Solo 800 mono power amplifier.

The easy route for Linn would have been to take its previous Klimax Solo 500 amps and beef them up. The Solo 500 was a great performer in its own right, but was intended to play nice with eight ohm loudspeakers, and the occasional sub-two ohm parts of a high-end loudspeaker’s impedance plot didn’t sit that comfortably. Bee ng up the Solo 500 would make for a relatively low distortion amplifier… but ‘relatively’ wasn’t in the Klimax Solo 800 brief.

The brief, briefly

Instead, Linn wanted to plant a flag in the high-end power amplifier market. And not just any flag; it wanted to plant The Definitive Statement flag in the high-end power amplifier world. To do that, the brief was simple; give it vanishingly low distortion across the board, make it able to drive any high-end loudspeaker you can think of to ‘healthy’ levels, and do it with headroom to spare at all levels. Oh, and it needs not to double up as a heat source and rack up the fuel bills in the process. Reshaping the world of high-end audio amplification in a single stroke; how hard can it be?

Putting on the cynical hat on for a moment, maybe changing the amplifier's high-end need not be quite as Herculean a task as one might first imagine. There is a lot of laurel-resting going on in that arena. A company might have made a ground-breaking design or two to make its reputation back in the day, but since then the same company has simply reinvented the wheel, often with minor variations on the same theme. Arguably, the last

product that shook the amplifier tree was Devialet with its Class ADH-based D-Premier and subsequent shiny pizza boxes. While ultimately Devialet didn’t up-end the high-end amplifier industry, it had an impact. Linn’s Klimax Solo 800 has the potential to have an even bigger impact.

Why? Because although what happens on the inside of the Linn Klimax Solo 800 is different to the high-end mainstream, it’s capable of being slotted into an existing system without completely redrawing that system. Devialet’s great selling point was also its great limitation; it replaced everything except a turntable and loudspeakers. That’s something not everyone wants to do; they might like their digital front-end or preamp. Even the box-count reduction wasn’t much loved by die-hard audiophiles, where every shelf in the rack tells its own story. While going down Linn’s ‘Exakt’ digital ecosystem route does require the listener to change almost everything to Linn’s own components, Linn’s Klimax Solo 800 mono amps are analogue power amplifiers and can be a direct replacement for your existing mono amps, or an upgrade for stereo designs.

Poor push-back

That’s not to say Linn didn’t get a spot of push-back when releasing the Klimax Solo 800, but that push-back was unjustified. There’s a tendency to oversimplification in audio circles (not helped by unfriendly rivalry resorting to lies). In this case, that meant “runs cool = Class D = bad!”.

This is a bit like farting in an elevator; wrong on so many levels. First, the Linn Klimax Solo 800 is not a Class D design. Second, even if it was Class D, this is not 2000 anymore and Class D has improved significantly since its early day. And third, it’s not Class D. I know just repeated the first one, but it’s such a significant bit of wrong, it’s worth repeating just in case someone is still dense enough to still think this is a Class D amplifier.

So, what we have in the Linn Klimax Solo 800 is a 27kg power amplifier that is ‘big’ by UK standards and ‘tiny’ compared to the likes of Boulder and D’Agostino. It’s also an amplifier that runs cool to the touch no matter how much punishment you choose to give it and is stable enough to just keep pumping out the power under any conditions this side of throwing rocks at the thing. But not Class D.