Linn Components

I have had the Klimaxx mono blocks for years and was happy. Recently juts having upgraditis so to speak I have auditioned some others including Gryphon Encore, NHB 108, ASR Emitter Exlusive2 and was stunned by what I was missing. A very large improvement in quality. Bass, warmth, macor & micro dynamics, inner detail, transients...still experimenting, but the Linns WILL be gone after this journey.

Henry, of the three amps you auditioned, Gryphon, ASR, Dart,
which did you like best and why?

Bart

I ended up ordering the Darts. To be frank I liked them all. Unfortunately no dealer where I live loans equip to audition at home so all of my impressions are by deduction. I have chronicled this on my system thread. In any case, Gryphon had a very fullsome bass. Best of the lot. I didn't know my speakers (the dealer happened to have the same set) could do that! Driving and perhaps a bit of a mid bass bump but very pleasing indeed. Everything else was very good too but top air a tiny bit lacking and a sense of delicacy when required was a not as good as the other two IMO. The ASR had that air thing going to the nth degree and there was a sense of you being transported to there as opposed to muscians being transported to your room. Bass may have been a tad light. Transparent and extremely quiet.

Dart: what can one say: you may have heard many say its the the perfect match btwn tubes and solid state. yes and no. It had a sweetness of tone, remarkable sound stage (ASR too), but when needed bass slammed. very fast and you could hang on to the decays (can't wait to try it with my EMM gear and play some SACDs) in the end, it just made me listen to the music. It may not be the most neutral of all (and indeed the term neutral is used so much that I think its starting to lose its meaning) but I fell in love with it.

But all three were exceptional. I think it comes down to personal tastes. Dart did it for me but you may differ.

I have a pair of Espeks and the Linn 2240 amp playing into them. While this is awesome, I owned the Ninkas with an Anthem entry level amp playing into them. My preamp is an AVM 20 from Anthem. I used a Toshiba DVD player as a digital transport. Once we upgraded the Ninka stands, that system sounded better than anything else for my ears. It wasn't my idea to upgrade, but the wife. Yeah, I'm whipped, that's why the wife gets what she wants.

I listened to a Linn system in a demo room. One thing I look for is a large sound stage and a precise image. With this system, everything sounded like it was coming from just one or two spots, and it sounded compressed. Maybe the speakers were not broken in. Maybe they were not well set up. But I did not bother going back. That store catered to people with more money than passion for music. In fact when I described what I was looking for, the dealer told me to go to Audiogon. How about that!