Quality

As my old Philips compact stereo was becoming old, broken and just not good enough, I decided to shop for an all new stereo in 2002. I was prepared to spend a fair amount of money and my basic idea was to get an amplifier that is all fancy and digital, good speakers, a CD player (which I figured could be cheap as the amp does all the work) and a record player. I had no idea what I was doing and everything came out differently.

I went to a few shops in Bremen, listening to several amplifiers, CD players and speakers by companies like NAD which have a reasonably good reputation. And, for sure, those stereos sounded superior to mine. But somehow I found that none of them gave me the ‘kick’ I hoped to get from dropping a few grand. I had asked someone from a music newsgroup on which ‘HiFi’ shops in Bremen are worth their money and in an extra note he recommended his favourite shop which »didn't quite match my requirements« in the sense that it overstretched my budget but which I thought I should try out anyway – if only because he took the time to give a detailed answer.

That shop focuses pretty much exclusively on peddling stereos by Linn which is a Scottish company focusing on ridiculously expensive machines. I explained my situation to the owner – including my budgetary constraints – and he said I should just try the stereo out with the CDs I brought.

Which is where the misery began. Because even the smallest setup he offered – which  ended up exceeding my planned budget by a third or so – sounded just right. No fuzzy or over-emphasised bass sound. No unclarity in the music. Just the plain and simple sound I wanted. And it came out of that compact stereo with the small speakers with no extra with no extra setup or adjustment needed.

I think they had me at that stage but I needed some more time and another listening session before I could convince myself to not only drop all of my initial ideas about going all-digital and for separate components but to also stretch my budget a bit further.

Sound-wise the Classik has never let me down since and I keep enjoying its sound. Its 80W amplifier does an excellent job free of any distortion. That’s really amazing because it not only makes the music sound clearer but it makes the music sound quieter as well – meaning that you can end up listening to music rather loudly and when someone comes in to talk to you you realise that you have to turn the volume down before you can talk comfortably. It also maintains its distortion free performance at high volumes, although I didn’t go higher than 80% of what's possible yet – mostly because things start getting seriously loud around the 60% level. The CD player sounds excellent. At least among the people I know, nobody has one that can match its sound.

Design-wise the Classik is quite nice because it is small and unexciting and the simple square case with a height of around 10 centimetres doesn’t give away the power in the machine. The display is rather minimal and defaults to going back to an inconspicuous -- display when you are not interacting with the stereo. The buttons on the front are just enough for basic operation.

A remote control is also supplied with the stereo to let you use all its features. Designing remote controls is certainly not a strength of Linn. I comes with 56 (4×14) buttons of the same size on a grid. These include pairs of buttons for volume, treble, bass and balance which could probably have been done more cleverly and there are even distinct previous / next buttons for ‘Skip’, ‘Search’ and ‘Index’ where most other CD players just unify the first two and the number of people on earth knowing what the last is for and owning a CD on which you can use it should be minimal.

Another nice thing about the Classik is that it includes a clock with an alarm clock feature – which is unusual for ‘better’ stereos. The only bad thing is that, inexplicably, the clock is extremely imprecise – going off by about a minute per month – something I expected to be better in device at this price.

Another detail they didn’t get right is that you can hear the CD’s laser travel quite clearly when skipping between songs or when a CD finishes playing and the head returns to the starting position. While that does not affect the music, it does not fit in with a device that is otherwise solidly built and quite pricey. The speed with which the CD player starts playing a CD when you insert it, is excellent, though.

Finally, there is one real problem I had with the stereo in its first five years. At some stage it just stopped working properly. And in a very strange way, that was. While all the audio components continued to work fine, the control electronics went insane. Pressing a button would sometimes do the right thing and at other times do nothing or do the desired thing after a minute or so. This rendered the stereo pretty much unusable. Luckily they offered a warranty extension from two to five years just for ‘registering’ the machine and I got that problem fixed for free which unfortunately  took a few weeks, though.