Linn Katan – a white and vintage two way speaker

Foreword

I had not enough time to visit Musiikin.com room during the Helsinki Highend and Hifimaailma 2008 event. So, I decided to make a separate visit afterwards. The hosts kindly promised to present me the same set-up which was demonstrated in the main event.

Scheu Show

I started off my visit by getting familiar with a new Scheu Diamond vinyl player (an acryl body model costs 2.250 €). It was really a beautiful, as some of the owners are (Katie Melua…), and technically sophisticated player. It included for example a separate 12 VDC motor with fine adjustments and 50 mm thick acryl plate (80 mm is optional!). A little 12VDC/550 mA transformer is also included, but Musiikin.com recommends using KingRex SLAP power unit (445 €) with the player. During the demo the Scheu Diamond had Roksan NIMA unipivot tone arm (650 €) and it worked very well with Linn Klyde MC cartridge (1.095 €).

I listened to the Scheu for a while as a part of Linn Majik set-up. It was a pleasure and especially listening to Jukka Tolonen’s Hysterica was a memorable moment. Anyway I could not make any deeper evaluation because the listened records were quite strange for me.

Little ones

The set-up consisted of Linn Exposure 3010 CD player (1.785 €), Exposure 3010 integrated amplifier (1.380 €) with an internal RIAA, Linn Katan speakers (1.195 €), Katan stands (244 €) and Linn cablings.

I listened to this set-up much longer than the previous Scheu & Linn Majik one. Additionally I used my favourite and personally widely used test CDs. Immediately I must point out that the listening results were great and partially surprising. One can not wait miracles from this kind of set-up but in its limits the sound was wonderful: great coherency, very clean pitches of tones, smooth over-all presentation and surprisingly big sonical picture (the players and vocalists seemed to be in correct places) made me happy! Especially I was delighted at the quite live-like sonical picture which is not a main target of the Flat Earth philosophy. Naturally I could list numerous lacks as well, but obviously every serious enthusiast can imagine that this kind of system will have moderate lacks for example in bass extensions, dynamics, control and resolution. But they are relatively slight ones, and when taking account the price of the system it is almost a sin to pay any further attention to them.

Conclusion

I am very careful about giving any bargain grades for any set-up or any component. So, although the demonstrated set-ups had wonderful sound, I still obstruct to give quite possible over-praises. Anyway, my very positive feelings and excellent price/quality evaluation, which clearly were the results of the visit, will lead into very high recommendations!