Nice to see over on the Linn forum some input from Linn acknowledging that the finer details of tunedem for cable directions etc. are relevant, but only become apparent when everything else is sorted.
Where philbo, one of their speaker designers, says:
As I stated in a later post, whether you can discern any difference really depends how clean the rest of your system is. If you have a pile of cable spaghetti you will never hear the improvement. If your components are stacked on top of each other you will never hear the improvement. If your speakers are not tune dem'd you will never hear the difference. Etc etc...
If you want to do the experiment I would recommend you strip the system down to the bare essentials - one source, one pre and one power. Avoid cables running over each other - a neat trick is to have the amps pointing the wrong way (rear panel facing you) as this allows the speaker runs to be kept away from everything else... Carefully tune dem the system to make it sound as good as it can be. Then, and only then, try the cable direction experiment.
Another great demo of how to break the system - once you have the perfect (simple) set-up as described above, try dropping a disconnected mains cable (not plugged into the mains or a product - free at both ends) across the speaker wires. Then listen again... If you do this you may end up spending a month or two trying to make you cables as neat as possible...
I like the idea of that "demo of how to break the system" :)
The "drop a disconnected mains cable across the speaker wire" trick is a new one to me. Got to try that some day. But rearranging cables is certainly worthwhile - and some things are more important than others. Having a cable squeezed or very tightly bent always seems to have a strong negative effect on sound quality. Makes you wonder about the old style P-clip and bend-out-through-the-plinth of the arm cable inside the LP12...
Stripping a system to the bare essentials can be very enlightening. If you start with that system, it usually sounds surprisingly good. Then when you reconnect your other pieces of kit, one by one, you might find that some of them have a really detrimental effect on performance. For example connecting a Wii power supply to the outlet (even a different outlet than your system uses) is sad. It gets a lot worse.
These kind of experiments can result in you not wanting anything but the bare essentials connected. I'm afraid it has for me...
The thread I referenced has turned into a fascinating discussion (albeit with a few sideways bits where people have posted some random "advice"). In particular there's been a lot of discussion about from Linn employees how Linn evalute things, including this:
I would guess throughout the R&D department here slightly more than 50% think cable directionailty makes a difference slightly less than 50% don't. I would also say that predominantley the more digital guys are unbelivers whilst the more analogue minded guys are the believers. I'm one of the unbelievers. Personally my background in science and engineer can't comprehend why it would make a difference and I've never seen a true blind study prove anything other than a typical standard deviation.
I have a caveat or two though, the guys here who can hear a difference are some of the best audio engineers about. If they can hear a difference who am I to say there isn't one.
I wonder if the engineers that can't hear cable directionality and work more on digital side were responsible for the Unidisk firmware. The DS firmware seems to have been a bit up and down in terms of tunefulness too - same team?
Anyway, it's great to read so much input from Linn staff and provides a very interesting insight into how they work.
