I recently attended a Linn LP12 showcase event here in Glasgow and there was a certain omission concerning Ariston decks and Castle Engineering.
The point of the Castle Engineering reference (and also the AR XA reference) is that the engineering philosophy/ design for the LP12 was not Linn’s.
This story of the birth of the LP12 and how evil Ivor stole the design from Hamish Robertson is often alluded to. That's the story I believed myself for many years but something about it just didn’t seem to fit. If Robertson had really designed the turntable and Castle were merely building it for him, how the heck did Ivor manage to win the court case? Ivor patented the single point bearing but the rest of the deck was identical to the RD11.
A few years ago I found and read the transcript of the court ruling, it's online somewhere. Reading that, and looking at the development of Ariston and Linn turntables going forward, the truth was obvious. Yes, Robertson had approached Castle with the idea of developing a turntable but they were better engineers than he was. Maybe building a turntable was his idea, maybe Ivor really liked the idea but I reckon the final product was at least as much Linn/Castle design as his so they had as much right to sell it as he did. That's why Ivor won the case. I suspect it was Linn/Castle who were responsible for most of the defining features of the deck.
Why do I think that? Because both Linn and Ariston continued to manufacture the turntable and we can see what they did. Linn developed the LP12 for decades and everything they did made sense and improved the performance, integrity, reliability or usability of the deck. They identified structural weaknesses and improved them and they never introduced a change which had no benefit or made the deck poorer.
Ariston continued to develop and sell turntables based on the design too but every single one was worse than the one before it. Many of the changes were completely pointless, added to the production cost or did nothing for the sound. Others made the deck more complicated, harder to set up, sound worse or be less reliable. Late Ariston turntables are a dog's dinner. A few examples of things introduced on later versions of the deck. They painted the top plate and the top of the platter, which you can’t even see when the mat is on. They changed the size of the sub-chassis and sub-platter slightly. They made the plinth a complicated muti-part assembly. They altered the orientation of the sub-chassis which unbalanced it and required an additional spring to pull it sideways.
It's really obvious which of the two camps knew what they were doing. I’m happy to criticize things which Linn do that I don’t like but they are clearly good mechanical engineers. I'm convinced it was Castle/Linn who were the brains behind the design. Robertson was a sore looser who knew he would struggle to compete. Note that Linn did not try to stop him from selling the deck. He had the same opportunity as Ivor/Linn did, they started from the same place, and it was no one’s fault but his own that he didn’t build on it.
As for the configuration, no Linn didn't invent it but so what? Do we criticize Ford because they didn't invent the motor chariot with a four-wheel, rear drive, front steering layout? No. They didn't invent the configuration, someone else did, but they made it work better by applying better engineering and production techniques. Likewise Linn built a better deck than AR or Thorens using the same basic layout. I'm not saying they don't work, I've got a TD160 here that sounds great, but it is not built to the same quality as the LP12 and there are some really stupid design features inside it. The AR never was a patch on the Linn and only got worse.
Linn have been successful with the LP12 because they deserve to be. They got the initial design right and have not put a foot wrong with it in fifty years! And that is not easy.