The early ones are also very fun,I think.
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I think I paid around Ā£700 for them late eighties.
But the shop kept phoning me telling me about mods and one night they came to my house and put all big long screws in all my drive units.
Then they stared talking about MK2s after I got the screws and put in rubber washers between the crossover and back panel then they started talking about different spikes I got fed up with all the tweaks I changed them for Kan 11.
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I agree with @sean86 . There are two types of live music, amped and unamped. Neither good in my opinion. Iāve given up on live music for the following reasons:
- Amped music, even at high end venues is just a smear of sound. You canāt make out lyrics unless you know them beforehand.
- Unamped music is totally unbalanced. The lack of any mixing adjustments invariably means that at that fancy Jazz bar, you are listening to a drummer and their background band. The seems as true for tiny cramped jazz bars as it is to really high end music halls like Yamaha hall. In fact, the sound treatment and diffusions in the acoustic halls diffuses it so much, itās basically in mono.
- Amped or unamped, both are too loud.
I suppose very simple non percussive arrangements could be very good but Iāve yet to hear any. If someone wants a night out, fine. But a gold standard? I canāt agree with that.
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It was a lot of tweaking of Linn Kan also,not everything got betterā¦
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I liked my Kans once they built me a pair that met my finish standard I even got presented with a pair with black glue through the grille.
Then they got a pair that looked great but one bass mid driver kept thumping and was discovered to be dud third time lucky.
I remember a pair of speakers they called Kan but were totally rubbish. 
Ahh,I āve had about 20 pairs of Kan over the years,never had those problems,but they sure do sound different from each other.
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Well said. I had a pair for 17 years and they were superb. If Iād stuck with Naim amps (long story) I would probably still have them today.
I always thought they were rather better than SBLās being much faster and more agile to my ears, though they didnāt have the scale or bass depth/weight of SBLās of course.
Iāve heard say that they were JVās favourite Naim speaker but Iāve no idea if thatās true or not.
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That is how it really sounds. Stereo is an unnatural artefact of the recording/replay process. If you like it thatās fair enough but it doesnāt exist, at least to anything like that extent, in real life. Iāve yet to attend any sort of live music event where I was able to discern anything resembling a stereo image. The sound just comes from over-there-ish.
It seems rather bizarre to be judging the sound of real live music against your hi-fi as being the reference point. It seems to me it should always be the other way around.
What you are saying is that you pefer the sound of your hi-fi to real music. That real music fails to live up to what your hi-fi can manage. Thatās fair enough if itās what you prefer. It seems very bizarre to me and we must have very different criteria as to how we react to and appreciate music.
I canāt agree that a hi-fi system should set the standard for live music to live up to. That seems to me to be the absolute reverse of what hi-fi is all about.
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More of a Kanāt than a Kan thenš.
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For me, live performances are primarily about atmosphere and seeing the performers actually performing. Sound quality is rarely optimal.
The āgold standardā for sound quality if music recorded live with simple miking and single take would be the live performance that was recorded, though where positioned would be the questionā¦ For music created in a studio, as was much of the non-classical music I like, live is rarely as good in terms as dound quality.
Incidentally I disagree re live being essentially mono: it simply depends on what is playing, the venue, how set up, and the listener position. I have certainly been to some orchestral performances, positioned such that the extremities left/right of the orchestra have been vaguely like the corners of an equilateral triangle relative to me, where I could clearly hear the spread of the orchestra. And I can always point to the position of the trumpets with my eyes closed! With amplified bands I have known instruments to have been positioned appropriately left-right to fit with main position on stage with stereo effect.
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Leaving aside music reproduction fir a moment, we hear in stereo, at least those of us with two good ears do, and I understand it is part of sound direction identification used by our brains.
Stereo recording is designed to create an illusion of reality, but that depends how itās done: with the simple technique of a microphone each side of performers it can get tolerably close to how someone might hear live close to the performers. Though Iāve never heard it, binaural recordings played through headphones is probably remarkably close to being there.
When I go to rock concerts I use ear plugs to drop the sound by 10 or 20db, depending.
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I agree. Personally, I donāt like it to be so loud it hurts, smeared, or unbalanced. I grew up going to gigs - saw some legends live and even rehearse before the show from Led Zep to Whitesnake, and heard Sakamoto Ryuichi at a couple decent music halls. I have no problems with the idea that hifi reproduction is a compromise and to some extent a fantasy that never existed. Iām not sure why that should matter. Ther is no such thing as a gold standard in my opinion. What each system reproduces is unique and only exists in that room and system. I donāt even regard the sound in the recording studio as the baseline. Plenty of domestic hifi are capable of going beyond that level. The mastering studio is more of a tool to let the engineer deep into the mix.
About the only live venue I heard that didnāt suffer any of the problems I have come to expect was a simple piano concerto recited by a friend of my wifeās as an old converted wooden structure church.
For the record, hifi is still āreal musicā. Itās just not ālive musicā.
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IIRC there was a much later speaker that Linn designated Kans after the originals had ceased production. It was a Kan only in name and it neither looked like or sounded like the original design.
Linn seemed to go through an odd sort of phase in the '90ās or thereabouts where they seemed to pretty much drop-out of the hi-fi scene as far as the hi-fi press went and churned out a load of so-so products that got mostly luke warm reviews - thatās if they were even noticed or reviewed at all.
Iāve never quite understood what all that was about and they have never really seemed to regain the sort of market presence that they once commanded as a top UK hi-fi manufacturer. Perhaps they should have stuck to turntables and speakers. Things seemed to start going pear-shaped when they started dabbling in electronics and fell out with Naim, although I think Naim precipitated this with their Armageddon LP12 P/S.
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Iāve never heard anything like that, and not at orchestral concerts either. Certainly there is a vague suggestion of where some instruments are positioned within an orchestra depending on oneās seating position, but no more than that for me.
But then in all my audio years Iāve yet to experience the sort of so-called holographic imaging in a system that some reviewers talk about, where one can almost walk around images of the performers and pin-point the position of each violin etc. Granted most speakers Iāve used have hardly been renowned for their imaging capabilities, but Iāve heard Quad ESLās and LS3/5aās more than once and never experienced their supposed exceptional imaging.
Iām no expert on recording techniques but with multiple channels available with close miking itās obviously possible to manipulate a recording so that various instruments may appear at defined postions within the sound stage. This IMO creates an unrealistic effect which has no parallel in real life.
Very simple recordings as you say with just two mikes either side of the performers will create something much closer to what we actually hear in real life.
It becomes a philosophical discussion as to which technique is more realistic. Realistic to what? Real life stage performances, which studio sessions are most certainly not, or realistic to the manipulated and manufactured sessions that typically are what takes place when recording an album.
In simple terms I think a hi-fi system should give the impression of live performers on a stage, however the recording was actually created. Thatās what Iām looking for in a system and what has informed my choice of speakers in particular. Not everyone will agree and thatās OK. We donāt all want the same thing.
AFAIK, the āArmageddonā mods came afterwardsā¦
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I did observe that the listenerās position is significant. As for holographic imaging imaging, I canāt say Iāve experienced that live (or recorded), but when close enough to the orchestra in a non-echoey auditorium, I can hear that the violins are on the left, cellos on the right, etc (And as previously indicated, trumpet I can pinpoint even from way back in the auditorium, so directional is their sound!)
That wasnāt to what I was referring when I said create an illusion. Yes that might be one way of doing so. Another is simple miking, etc. But I simply meant by presenting us with sound coming from two places in the room, nominally representing two sampling positions at the recording, our brains assemble the mixture of sound as a whole, and this is more complete than hearing the entirety of the music coming from a single point, which is more into listening for a gap in the wall. (Albeit that some people like it that way.)
Right - my memory is very hazy around the time line of all this. I do recall when Linn first started marketing amps and their first one was basically a modified re-badged version of I think a Japanese amp (donāt know which one) which got dreadful reviews as I recall.
I thought the Linn/Naim parting of the ways was as a result of the Armageddon. Maybe it was the Aro? My recollection is of Naim having the temerity (in Linnās eyes) to produce something that they claimed improved Linnās beloved LP12. Just too much for Mr T to take. I recall of course what I read of it - the legend. I donāt know first-hand!
I believe that relations first became somewhat strained after the introduction by Linn of the LK1 and LK2 pre/power amp, which aimed to directly challenge Naim in the marketplace. The ARO and Armageddon mods to the LP12 came along much later
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