Linn Majik LP12 Turntable, Krane Tonearm, and Adikt MM Cartridge

By Wayne Garcia

A Classic Miss

“If you haven’t heard it, then you don’t have a bleepin’ opinion!”

Or far saltier words to that effect were among the first I heard from Ivor Tiefenbrun, the take-no-prisoners-or-BS founder of Scotland’s Linn Products Ltd.

This was roughly 1977 or ’78. I was a mere pup, barely twenty, who’d landed a job at one of the Bay Area’s best high-end audio shops, and Ivor was touring the States conducting dealer training and proselytizing all things Linn.

Tiefenbrun’s gauntlet throw-down was directed at people—and back in the Seventies there were plenty of them—who insisted that, as long as a turntable had no discernable wow, flutter, or other measurably operational flaws, record players made no real contribution to the sound of an audio system. In other words, as long as they spun records more or less accurately, they all sounded the same; cartridge choice notwithstanding.

Today this simplistic notion seems ludicrous, as ever since that time the turntable’s paramount role i…