Why has Linn never made a fully automatic or even semi automatic turntable? I’ve owned two Linn Sondeks in the past but eventually sold them and gravitated to CD and streaming for the shear ease of use and convenience. I remember also owning a fully automatic Sony turntable in the past which sounded pretty good and was a pleasure to use. I’ve noticed that Thorens have a few models in their range. Any thoughts?
They have never found favour with the Audiophile marker.
Interesting that Technics ( I believe offer this facility on two of their current decks)
Ian
Though not on their top decks.
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I suppose that the answer that Linn would give would run along the lines of “too much mechanical gubbins would degrade the sound”.
I used to have one of those AT “end of side lifter” jobbies on my Sondek, but it hasn’t been fitted for a couple of decades…and I can’t remember why I removed it. Indeed I was looking for it several months ago in my junk box, and not finding it. Perhaps it never really worked with my Zeta arm?
Less is more.
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Argh, get thee behind me Satan
An abomination
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I think it’s the perfect answer to all those (& there seems to be quite a few here) whose main objection to vinyl is having to get up every 20 minutes or so to turn the album over!
I’ll own up and say I wish my LP12 had a lifter; I suffer from Essential Tremor (shakey hands in plain English), and lifting the arm cleanly off a record can be very difficult. I never lift the arm mid LP…
But if you had a multi -stacker LP12 you wouldn’t need an automatic lifter very often.
Linn have missed a very important upgrade opportunity here in my opinion…..
Well the Technics decks with automatic function is only arm lift on lead out. Not arm down on lead in.
Though as a non automatic Technics user I offer the following generic observation:
- Arm lift down is on nearly all decks soft and steady.
- Lead out with the expected closing spiral “pop” isn’t hurting anything. There are groove transients more violent than that.
With that in mind, it’s no trouble to start and it’s no problem if you fall asleep during play. No need to leap up after the last track.
I once read on a forum about a guy coming home from a fortnights holiday to a strange ticking noise.
When he left he forgot about playing an album. 
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I think the only problem is it adds 336 hours of use on the stylus and cartridge.
A Sondek was intendedly simple and minimal so to minimise interference, and the suspended system isolates the whole mechanism to let the cart to retrieve most information from grooves that form the musicality.
Automatic arm simply defeat the purpose, not high end either.
It’s mainly down to the automatic functions being considered a performance compromise. More things to vibrate or resonate, arm mechanisms that can put greater stress on fragile bearings, etc..
There are some pretty good sounding fully automatic decks though, if that’s your want. One of the best was the Technics SL series of linear trackers - the SL-7, SL-10 and SL-15 in particular. Of course these would probably be super-expensive today were they brought back into production and the P-mount (T4P) cartridges available are somewhat limited these days compared to what Technics offered back then, but if you listen to one of these SL decks with something like a Technics EPC-310 MC onboard then you might be surprised at how good they can sound.
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I’ve seen this before. It’s the ill-fated Linn Kokup fully automatic modification for the LP12 from the late 70’s which never made it to dealers. I think the intention was to compete with the many automatic BSR decks around at the time but unlike BSR Linn lacked the necessary engineering skills to pull it off.
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My LP12 is automatic for friends when they visit, and we listen to LPs. I put the record on, they listen, when we get to the end of the side, I get up and take it off, turn it over, play the second side if wanted, before putting another LP on and repeating the process. They are amazed at how easy it is, they don’t even have to get their phone out, open an app and choose more music.
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The story goes like this. Linn had taken on a bright young graduate engineer, fresh out of Cambridge. During a drunken Hogmanay bash he proposed the idea of automating the LP12, giving it full auto-change capability. Ever eager to foster young talent Linn gave him full support to develop his idea, which resulted in the shockingly inept contraption pictured by @Skeptikal .
Mr. T, reportedly never one to suffer fools gladly, promptly gave him his marching orders. But not before giving the unfortunate fellow a thorough carpeting for this buffoonery. Somewhat traumatised by this he apparently abandoned engineering in favour of a career in literature as a freelance writer of fiction. He did very well indeed for himself in his new career and received many commisions from the various rail operators to compile their train timetables.
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