I’d personally not put those two together. Linn are in original pioneer/family ownership, as are Rega. Naim, like Quad, Tannoy, and if you stretch it to include a badge on an IAG box, Leak, are all in foreign ownership with some greater or lesser UK presence (Naim currently having the most).
FWIW I personally feel the best companies have a natural creative flow, trajectory, and lifespan that is almost always attached to the original visionary. I still view Naim as Julian Vereker, just as I view Linn as Ivor T, Quad as Peter Walker, Leak as Harold Leak etc. I’d argue Leak were over as soon as Harold sold the brand to Rank, it just wasn’t the same company even if they made stuff in the UK for a decade or so after that point. I was half tempted to suggest Tannoy were over once Guy Fountain had sold-up too, but they did make some very good speakers after that point (HPDs onwards) so buck the trend a little even if their real innovation had all been done decades earlier. A lot of old hi-fi companies are almost the equivalent of a cover band; like going to see ‘The Jimi Hendrix Experience’ now with no original members, but still playing all the old songs for a far more monied audience.
I think this may have been Dave Berriman at Practicle HiFi as he reviewed a few turntables in the early 1980's he thought were better than the Linn.
In 1981 (March) he wrote a review of the Trio / Kenwood L-07D and he thought was better than the Linn and in July 81 a comparison of the Oracle and the L-07D where he concluded each had certain strengths, but both were better than the current Linn.
Strangely I was an LP12 owner and little before those reviews came out I had also compared both the L-07D and Oracle to the LP12. It was one of the very few times I have agreed almost entirely with what a reviewer has written. His L-07D to Oracle comparison was almost exactly as I heard them. I had already traded in my LP12 and bought an L-07D when those reviews appeared and I'm still using it.
I acknowledge this, up to a point, but I think we should recall that prior to this, reviews barely mentioned what the product actually sounded like. So they catered almost exclusively to a technical audience. They were little use for anybody trying to choose between competing products, and were largely predicated on the idea that once it passed the 'good enough' threshold, there was nothing more to be said in terms of what it sounded like. Considerations of choice focussed more on technical suitability with partnering devices.It coincided with the beginning of subjective reviewing.
Earlier all reviewers had the equipment and expertise to evaluate how well stuff worked.
In the 1970s, following the lead of Jean Hiraga it was open season for anybody to review stuff just by listening to it, for better or worse, so literally anybody, whether they understood what was going on or not, could have a go and their opinion become valid.
Cult and suggestibility is easy in these circumstances and that is what happened. Whatever was fashionable in different countries (I was travelling all over the world for work from the mid-1970s to 2010) varied enormously depending on the fashionable local reviewer and his manufacturer or distributor mates. <snip>
HiFi is a fashion business and fashions change.
One deck killed idler drive's rep, and that was the woeful Garrard SP 25 - sounded like a tin-plate toy turntable and (if I rcall correctly) actually got worse as Garrard desperately tried to compete on price with heavily-subsidised Japanese competition.
Theo,Hi Jim
I also have a copy of that Berriman review! I remember hearing a Bespoke Audio system at a hifi show in the late '70s/early '80s (could have been Harrogate, possibly Last Drop Hotel, Bolton), and being utterly mesmerised by the L-07D/Albarry/Allison system. It sounded magnificent, and I came away knowing that I wanted an L-07D, but couldn't afford it.
I then succumbed to the hifi press at the time and bought an LP12 (it was then half the cost of the L-07D). The money spent on it over the years until I finally got off the bandwagon is chastening. After 27 years, I sold it to buy the very same L-07D from that show (sold to me by the guy from Bespoke). It got fettled and rebuilt, and has given me 10 years of trouble-free service since. Yes, it's had an additional arm and countless cartridge rebuilds, but the t/t itself is as it was 10 years ago. It sounds fantastic, without any of the paranoia of future upgrades. I expect it to see me out.
The press wasn't all biased: it pointed me towards Exposure amplification and a number of other items I had over the years (Micromega, Esoteric, Neat) which I have loved and cherished. I could never understand the love for Naim amplification though, and I borrowed enough of it in an attempt to convince myself. Ultimately, I realised that the press presents an opinion (biased or otherwise) which doesn't have to tally with my experience (or my ears). Having said that, reading some of the old equipment reviews from those days brings back fond memories of reviewers with strongly-held opinions
...and the amount of total bollocks which has become "common knowledge" about record players is very disappointing.
Laskys wasn’t really high end, but I was also an avid reader of the Hi-Fi press back then, it always amazed me the difference between what I heard and what the reviewer wrote when one of their components was reviewed.
There was an establishment: Quad, SME, Thorens, Gramophone and HiFi News. Some new guys came along, made some noise, shifted the paradigm and became the new establishment. However good Quad/SME/Thorens/ESL systems were for some kinds of music in some kinds of rooms, they were pretty poor at playing Dark Side of Moon enjoyably and so the Linn Naim massive had its day in the sun and built their sales on a million dems of “Money” and deservedly made some too. But then Linn and Naim went their own ways. Don’t think a particular kind of shallow technical reviewing had any more or less merit than the subjective spliff-fuelled gibberings of the small coterie that wrote for hifi magazines. Now it’s unboxing videos on YouTube. What next?
I acknowledge this, up to a point, but I think we should recall that prior to this, reviews barely mentioned what the product actually sounded like. So they catered almost exclusively to a technical audience. They were little use for anybody trying to choose between competing products,
Subjective reviews, on the other hand, can help a lay reader to form a mental picture of whether a particular product might be of interest to them. .
Re-boxing videos
However good Quad/SME/Thorens/ESL systems were for some kinds of music in some kinds of rooms, they were pretty poor at playing Dark Side of Moon enjoyably...
I keep wishing someone could convince HFN to do a reprint book of articles from the early John Crabbe era. Its a goldmine of technical info, inc some remarkable DIY. I've suggested it, but the modern assumption is that readers aren't interested. Ditto for the old yearbooks.