A few weeks ago I had a Linn Klimax DS on loan. I've have the Akurate model for a couple of years, and I rate it highly, so when a used KDS came up I felt I had to give it a try. Both my Akurate and the Klimax are the "first generation" models, and both have the Dynamik power supply. There have been revisions of the audio board for both.
First, the KDS is a beautiful thing. Extremely elegantly styled, and very tactile. It's got an understated beauty that my eye favours over the overstated casework of DarTZeel, Soulution etc. (Sorry for the crappy phone picture, my camera battery was flat and I couldn't find the charger. Click for big.)
If you don't know, the DS streamers require a UPnP media server, which serves up the music in the codec of your choice, and suitable control point software running on a phone or other device. I use Fuppes and BubbleDS with my Akurate, and I expected the KDS to slot right in to my infrastructure and "just work", as people like to say now. However, it "just didn't". I have no idea why, but it wouldn't pick up a DHCP address from my router, and UPnP won't let you assign static addresses. Many reboots, reconnections, tests, and expletives later, it mysteriously started to work for no good reason. No idea why. I don't blame Linn for this, I blame the whole baroque, convoluted, over-engineered, built-by-committee DNLA standard. IMO the client-server way the Squeezebox stuff works is far simpler and therefore superior.
Anyway, once it was working, how did it sound? It sounded just how I like my hi-fi - of pretty close to nothing. There's a definite lack of colour, and whatever kind of music I threw at it, I couldn't detect any common "sound" from the DS. It just got out of the way and let the music flow. It's very dynamic and alive, you want to keep listening, as you do a good turntable. This is very much in keeping with "honest" style of my system.
There's a lot of detail and precision, and the micro-dynamics are very good. If your recording has captured nuance and subtlety, the KDS will bring it out. It didn't seem a jaw-dropping step up from the ADS, but the more I listened, the more I heard, which I think is the case with all good hi-fi. I fed it some hi-res recordings. 24 bit, mostly 88kHz, some 192kHz stuff and I remain unconvinced about the sonic benefits of those huge files. In an age when storage is as good as free, I'll take the hi-res just in case, but to be quite honest, I can't tell a difference. Certainly any improvement one might get from higher resolution is miniscule compared to the difference in moving the speakers an inch or two in the right direction, and it's swamped by the differences in recording and mastering quality.
There was one lp though, that blew me away. Chris Thile's How to Grow a Woman from the Ground has been lauded by many people for the quality of its recording - the musicians sitting round a couple of Telefunken mics, straight on to tape. Through my ADS I couldn't see the fuss. Sure it sounded fine, but nothing more. Through the KDS it is stunning. Tick all the hi-fi reviewer's cliches about soundstaging and realism - it's incredible. Give the KDS a brilliant recording, and you will get a brilliant result. I don't think I've ever heard a digital source sound better. (This is a normal redbook standard recording.)
Listening to Broadcast's Noise Made By People, one of my favourite, most familiar albums, revealed details and subtleties of texture that I'm not sure I even get from the Acutus. Pretty much everything I played seemed more alive and vital than I remembered it. The player is a lot of fun to listen to, without adding anything to the recording. It's not in any way tiring either. You could sit there all day cueing stuff up and losing yourself in music. I know, because I did.
Going back to the Akurate, I could easily hear the "approximation" it made to the Klimax's "truth". A lower resolution if you like, and a barely perceptible - but inarguably there - artifact, a kind of halo around instruments that I had never noticed before, and which the Klimax doesn't have. The Klimax is in a different league, and I truly think it's the best digital source I've heard.
So obviously, I bought it. It's a no-brainer, right? Well, no. This was a second-hand KDS, and the vendor wanted £7000 for it. Given a current RRP of £13,000, and the price used models normally go for, this is perfectly fair. But it simply wasn't worth it to me. I'd have had to sell my Akurate and chuck in another £5k, and good as it is, it's not that good. For that kind of money I'd need to feel I couldn't live without it; that it made my current source sound like a piece of crap; and that I was getting good value. I felt none of those things. At £7k it's too damned expensive. At £13k, someone's having a laugh. The case is beautifully machined, much R&D has gone into it I'm sure, but this isn't some small run, hand-made, high-wastage, hard to engineer product from a boutique manufacturer. It's a circuit board, a switch-mode power supply and an off-the-shelf DAC made in large volumes by a well-established vendor. There's no earthly reason it should cost that kind of money other than that some people are rich/daft enough to pay it. (And yes, I do understand that's how a free market works!)
Maybe I'm cutting my nose off to spite my face. Since having the KDS I've spent as much as it would have cost on a new phono stage. But, analogue is my primary source, so I feel that I'll get better value from an investment in that area, and I also don't feel the manufacturer of the phono amp is taking the proverbial. I still believe the ADS is an excellent digital source, and having spent time with the KDS I enjoy it no less. Maybe one day I'll be able to see past the price, or bag one for a song. I hope so, because it isn't half good.
First, the KDS is a beautiful thing. Extremely elegantly styled, and very tactile. It's got an understated beauty that my eye favours over the overstated casework of DarTZeel, Soulution etc. (Sorry for the crappy phone picture, my camera battery was flat and I couldn't find the charger. Click for big.)
If you don't know, the DS streamers require a UPnP media server, which serves up the music in the codec of your choice, and suitable control point software running on a phone or other device. I use Fuppes and BubbleDS with my Akurate, and I expected the KDS to slot right in to my infrastructure and "just work", as people like to say now. However, it "just didn't". I have no idea why, but it wouldn't pick up a DHCP address from my router, and UPnP won't let you assign static addresses. Many reboots, reconnections, tests, and expletives later, it mysteriously started to work for no good reason. No idea why. I don't blame Linn for this, I blame the whole baroque, convoluted, over-engineered, built-by-committee DNLA standard. IMO the client-server way the Squeezebox stuff works is far simpler and therefore superior.
Anyway, once it was working, how did it sound? It sounded just how I like my hi-fi - of pretty close to nothing. There's a definite lack of colour, and whatever kind of music I threw at it, I couldn't detect any common "sound" from the DS. It just got out of the way and let the music flow. It's very dynamic and alive, you want to keep listening, as you do a good turntable. This is very much in keeping with "honest" style of my system.
There's a lot of detail and precision, and the micro-dynamics are very good. If your recording has captured nuance and subtlety, the KDS will bring it out. It didn't seem a jaw-dropping step up from the ADS, but the more I listened, the more I heard, which I think is the case with all good hi-fi. I fed it some hi-res recordings. 24 bit, mostly 88kHz, some 192kHz stuff and I remain unconvinced about the sonic benefits of those huge files. In an age when storage is as good as free, I'll take the hi-res just in case, but to be quite honest, I can't tell a difference. Certainly any improvement one might get from higher resolution is miniscule compared to the difference in moving the speakers an inch or two in the right direction, and it's swamped by the differences in recording and mastering quality.
There was one lp though, that blew me away. Chris Thile's How to Grow a Woman from the Ground has been lauded by many people for the quality of its recording - the musicians sitting round a couple of Telefunken mics, straight on to tape. Through my ADS I couldn't see the fuss. Sure it sounded fine, but nothing more. Through the KDS it is stunning. Tick all the hi-fi reviewer's cliches about soundstaging and realism - it's incredible. Give the KDS a brilliant recording, and you will get a brilliant result. I don't think I've ever heard a digital source sound better. (This is a normal redbook standard recording.)
Listening to Broadcast's Noise Made By People, one of my favourite, most familiar albums, revealed details and subtleties of texture that I'm not sure I even get from the Acutus. Pretty much everything I played seemed more alive and vital than I remembered it. The player is a lot of fun to listen to, without adding anything to the recording. It's not in any way tiring either. You could sit there all day cueing stuff up and losing yourself in music. I know, because I did.
Going back to the Akurate, I could easily hear the "approximation" it made to the Klimax's "truth". A lower resolution if you like, and a barely perceptible - but inarguably there - artifact, a kind of halo around instruments that I had never noticed before, and which the Klimax doesn't have. The Klimax is in a different league, and I truly think it's the best digital source I've heard.
So obviously, I bought it. It's a no-brainer, right? Well, no. This was a second-hand KDS, and the vendor wanted £7000 for it. Given a current RRP of £13,000, and the price used models normally go for, this is perfectly fair. But it simply wasn't worth it to me. I'd have had to sell my Akurate and chuck in another £5k, and good as it is, it's not that good. For that kind of money I'd need to feel I couldn't live without it; that it made my current source sound like a piece of crap; and that I was getting good value. I felt none of those things. At £7k it's too damned expensive. At £13k, someone's having a laugh. The case is beautifully machined, much R&D has gone into it I'm sure, but this isn't some small run, hand-made, high-wastage, hard to engineer product from a boutique manufacturer. It's a circuit board, a switch-mode power supply and an off-the-shelf DAC made in large volumes by a well-established vendor. There's no earthly reason it should cost that kind of money other than that some people are rich/daft enough to pay it. (And yes, I do understand that's how a free market works!)
Maybe I'm cutting my nose off to spite my face. Since having the KDS I've spent as much as it would have cost on a new phono stage. But, analogue is my primary source, so I feel that I'll get better value from an investment in that area, and I also don't feel the manufacturer of the phono amp is taking the proverbial. I still believe the ADS is an excellent digital source, and having spent time with the KDS I enjoy it no less. Maybe one day I'll be able to see past the price, or bag one for a song. I hope so, because it isn't half good.
