OT: Something for Christmas at Harrods

[Andrew]

For Brian,

It's Linn's foray into Wireless Speakers, but not for the masses.

[spuorgelgoog]

At £2950?

The masses will pay that total in instalments for some crap from The Weekly Payment Shop

Owain

[newshound]

WTF does this mean?

"But before we get to it, an important nod to what helps makes it happen: Linn?s proprietary Exakt technology. Linn Exakt aims to reduce phase errors by intentionally delaying higher frequencies so they arrive a your ear at the same time as lower frequencies. It also keeps the music signal?s data in the digital domain for as long as possible to avoid any degradation caused by signal processing."

[newshound]

£2450 somewhere else in the article. Plus another £2450 if you want a stereo pair.

Looks like a bit of what used to be called modern art.

[mm0fmf]

Linn's Exakt is a methodology of sending digital audio about that features low jitter transmission and keeping the signal in the digital domain as long as possible before converting back to an analogue signal. i.e. transmit the signal everywhere digitally and convert to analogue just before the amp instead of having wires carrying analogue signals about.

There's lots and lots of tosh written about hifi so you can apply what ever marketing word filters you want. What you need to do is simply listen to these things and if you like how they sound and the price is in your budget then you buy them. You can argue whether a £2500 wireless speaker sounds good enough to be worth it or not. In the end the proof is what you can hear, or think you can hear.

I heard a demo of how timing jitter spoils CD players about 15 years back. Normally the timing comes from a crystal oscillator and you can get good timing from things which cost pennies. But, the signal will have small variations in frequency and that interferes with the conversion back to analogue in hard to describe way. (Look up crystal oscillator phase noise for more detail.) The demo consisted of a cheap £100 CD player were it could be switched between the standard cheap crystal and a very accurate, very low phase noise oscillator. It was difficult to describe the improvement but the low phase noise setup sounded better/nicer. The difference wasn't even obvious till you had been listening for a while.

Like everything hifi, use your ears to determine if it's any good.

[spuorgelgoog]

Blinkin eck.

But if they're sold individually how do you get a matched stereo pair?

Owain

[Tim+]

Sheesh. That is one ugly speaker. Might appeal to Brian though as he would just judge it on sound quality and wouldn?t have to look at it. ;-)

Tim

[newshound]

ROFL!

[invalid]

Was it a blind test?

CD players don't introduce jitter, the DA might and that probably isn't anything to do with the CD player. CD players tend to be connected by digital links not analogue. Linn have put the DA in the speakers as have many others, even Amazon. They nearly all use similar chips too.

and don't ask what's producing the sound.

If you know what it is you will be biased.

[tim...]

You don't ned to buy 2 because it's "the best one box speaker" available

no, I don't get it either

[Brian Gaff]

I'm not sure I want to know. I guess the new lossless streaming services are the catalyst for this sort of thing. I'd like to download my albums in lossless, not just stream content. That way we could indeed stop making physical media, as we could make our own if we wanted to. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Nothing there that says anything to me. What is it like on something actually created to be natural sounding not some compressed modern invention of what audio should entail?

Brian

[Clive Page]

Can anyone explain why they are called "wireless" speakers - the photos show a dirty great mains lead in there. The speakers I have had for some years don't need any mains power, which makes it *much* easier to site them in the room. Apart from the price, the need for power seems a huge disincentive.

[Andrew]

:-)

[Andrew]

I asked the Sonos rep in John Lewis this question once.

He said that the speaker had two physical speakers in it, one for the base and one for the higher fequencies !.

I resisted the temptation to say that because they are physically mounted one above the other, do you need to be lying down to get the proper 'stereo' effect ?.

[Pamela]

Russ Andews must be eating his heart out to see wireless speakers cost more than his overpriced cables.

[Andy Burns]

Maybe he'd be interested in licencing my cylinders of SuperÆther?, dispensed through one sprinkler head per room guarantees better wireless reception up to 2.4GHz or use two sprinkler heads for 5.2GHz

[whisky-dave]

For the same reason early radios were called wirelesses I assume.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Perhaps they have an individual speaker unit for each and every Hz. To maintain phase across the entire spectrum.

Is this the same Linn as used to hate CD purely because it was digital? Nothing to do with them only making LP decks? Until they eventually produced a CD player, of course.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Oddly, I was repairing a Linn pre-amp the other day. Dating from the 90s. Which was very expensive then.

The heart of it was a chip you'd fine in many a music centre. ;-)