I'm curious, not having owned one (or ever been into vinyl in any serious way): Was the LP12 really any good? Or was it simply a just-about affordable mid-fi turntable? With lots of marketing hype and the clever upgradeability.
Well, just a little bit OT ...
The LP12 was entirely revolutionary, not because it was better than the competition in any kind of fundamental way, but because it changed the mind-set of the hifi community so comprehensively.
I was in the industry at the time and we certainly sold (and supported and maintained and upgraded and made a whole bunch of money from) the LP12 over the years. In my view it's a bit of an air-cooled Porsche 911 sort of a thing - you can keep on changing and upgrading and altering it to suit your taste and budget and degree of obsession, but the underlying engineering is nothing remarkable. Linn has taken some straightforward ideas and has developed and refined them enormously over the years, but it's still fundamentally the same box of tricks, with the same strengths and weaknesses as ever. Like the Porsche, the fan-base can get a bit one-eyed at times (looks over shoulder, checks own Meridian obsession ...)
What Linn (and to an extent Naim) did was propose a different way of thinking about hifi components. They comprehensively made the argument that the source matters; that the amplifier will only amplify whatever the turntable system sends it, and the speakers will only reproduce whatever is in the chain beforehand. Prior to the LP12, that kind of thinking wasn't really articulated, and plenty of hifi dealers (us included) used to tell customers that a "balanced system" was the nirvana ... without ever being clear what that actually comprised.
But after Linn got started, you could connect an LP12 to a NAD3120 and a good pair of bookshelf speakers, and it would demonstrably sound better than just about any other turntable, and most "balanced" systems at an equivalent price-point. Genuinely, having a better-quality source mattered for the first time. And while this may sound obvious now, it really wasn't the case in the late 70s and early 80s. Certainly, no other manufacturer made the case for a better turntable with the clarity and consistency that Linn did, and that was the thing that changed the industry and the way we thought about hifi.
Obviously the LP12 wasn't (and definitely isn't) the last word in turntable engineering - but without it, I'm not sure the relentless rush to more and more exotic and expensive vinyl front ends would ever have occurred. It's hard to imagine how we would have gone from selling a perfectly ordinary $500 turntable to selling some $100,000 engineering behemoth hand-carved out of solid unobtainium by near-sighted elves in one step - the market for the exotic stuff just didn't really exist before Linn came along. And there's no doubt that we're able to get some pretty spectacular results from humble old vinyl these days, even if it isn't everyone's cup of tea (mine included), so for a whole bunch of music enthusiasts it's been a very worthwhile journey.
So in my view we do owe Ivor and Linn and the LP12 their honourable place in hifi history, even if the world has largely moved on.
Google Search
|
Meridian Systems
|
Meridian Streaming
|
Restaurant
|
WiKi
|
Duncan's Meridian Info
|
Board Rules
|
Restaurant Rules
