Inheriting a legacy of audio excellence, Gilad Tiefenbrun as CEO has propelled Linn Products to new heights. His leadership has expanded the company's reach beyond iconic turntables to encompass the entire spectrum of high-fidelity audio, from digital streaming to cutting-edge speaker technology. Nishant Padhiar catches up with the analog man gone digital!
Linn Supreme: In conversation with Linn CEO Gilad Tiefenbrun
Linn’s CEO Gilad Tiefenbrun talks innovation, Indian markets and the future of Linn in India


It’s not Linn’s first rodeo in India. The legendary Scottish hi-fi brand had a brief but trivial outing in India back in the 90’s via an avid audiophile who tried to spread his enthusiasm for the brand. But now, finally, Linn is officially being represented in India by seasoned professionals Audio Nirvana (New Delhi), which also served as the perfect time for the brand’s custodian to visit India and share his thoughts and vision for the Indian market.
Some people will buy Ferraris and Porsches, and they'll paint them bright colours or they'll wear Rolex watches to show that they're the upper echelon of society. It takes time for the market to develop, where people start to think about what's going on inside their house instead of outside their house, right? And we see that beginning now in the early stages in India. It starts small and the market develops and that tends to be where the middle class develops. So I think It's probably on some kind of hockey stick path right now. Rapid growth. That's where we see it.
With a constantly evolving portfolio that is driven by the brand’s pursuit of perfecting a product over years, the modular and upgradeable nature of Linn is what makes it different to its peers.
Everything we do is for a reason, so we're an engineering company. That means that we start with the technology; we don't start with the product. So no one at Linn is saying, “Hey, wouldn't it be cool to have a streamer at this price point?” It doesn't work like that.
Our engineers are constantly working on technologies that will improve the audio signal path, one way or another. Lower noise, lower distortion, solve a problem of the room, improve the expression of a loudspeaker, improve the precision of a drive unit…that's our technology roadmap. From there, the products follow. So we're not a management-led company. It all comes from technology, the engineering.
And from there, we say, okay, we're going to have new power supply technology. So we can make the Utopik power supply. We're going to be able to access massive amounts of cloud-based computation, so we can do Space Optimisation and do the next version of Space Op with better computation. And the Utopik power supply is better than what we had in the Dynamik power supply. It all started years before, so there's no guesswork. There are no golden ears. There's nobody going “I wonder”. Of course, we listen and it has to match.

For a company that started off as a specialist turntable manufacturer, Linn has successfully branched out into other product categories, especially digital. Gilad championed the push into streamers and networked hi-fi before the industry was ready for it. Apparently, the gamble has paid off!
Ultimately, we are an engineering company. It started with mechanical engineering, which was the original LP12 and the Isobaric speakers. But then we moved into electrical engineering with active crossovers and then into electronics with power amplifiers, pre-amplifiers, microprocessor control, CD players, surround sound, and ultimately into streaming. That's when we moved into software engineering. Now, we always had software engineering, but it was to make the lights go on in the CD player. But software engineering to really be a core part of solving the problem of improving the sound started with the streamer. The architecture of the DAC, the architecture of the streaming solution. Then we move into cloud computing. Space optimization, exact crossovers. How we can solve the problem of phase distortion and speakers. Now, we have true phase linearity with Exakt technology across our speakers. I don't think anyone else has it.
Bridging the gap between analog and digital has long tickled the brand’s engineering bone. And yet, they’ve managed to do it without alienating the vinyl purists.
With our Urika II digital phono stage, you can go directly over the network from the turntable to the speakers. Why? Because that protects the signal incredibly well. We digitize it with the Urika II straight off the tone arm and transmit it over the network. So the turntable is now analog and digital. At Linn, we don't separate digital and analog in our minds. We think of how to combine digital and analog technologies regardless of the product format. The Solo 800 has the Adaptive Bias control. That's a digital real-time technology running inside an amplifier, and of course, 360 speakers are very much analog and digital. So I believe we're the only Hi-Fi company with this breadth of skill set and depth of understanding.

This kind of forward thinking has been a part of Linn since it was founded in 1973 by Ivor Tiefenbrun in Glasgow, starting with the original Sondek LP12 turntable
Of course, the fact that it was made to be modular by my father. When he invented the first prototype of the turntable, his insight was ‘technology is going to keep improving, and you can see where we are today!’ He had that vision to say, “Okay, I've made a great turntable, but it's not the best it will ever be because the technology is going to get better over time.” That's why he designed it to be modular and upgradable, and that had two main benefits. The first was that it meant that other engineers who bought into that idea could come and work with my dad. They could work in parallel because it's modular, like working on Linux or something. So one person's working on a new tone arm, one is working on a new sub-chassis or the power supply or whatever. There are almost 40 different upgradable parts.
A lot many times, in India, audiophiles shy away from even sophisticated turntable tech citing fears of high maintenance and dust-related issues in our environment.
It's a process. It's not as easy as just pressing play on the remote, and we don't mind the dust. We will happily demonstrate the oldest, dustiest record on an LP12. My father said, the best way to clean a record is to play it. Play it on an LP12 because the needle gets so far into the groove.

This level of confidence in vinyl playback systems is infectious and apparently it got even the world’s most celebrated product designer, Jony Ive to jump on the bandwagon, right?
You know, what got him interested in a project like the LP12-50 was because he graduated from the Royal College of Arts in London, and as part of a study group, there was a trip to Linn. So he went to Linn as a 21-year-old or something, and all the time in his mind he had an LP12. And then I guess he moved houses and he forgot about it. He had another brand but was really missing what he had before. He contacted me on LinkedIn, or his PA did. I thought this was bullshit and I put it in the trash because this was during lockdown and you're getting so many requests anyway! But then later that day I was like, something's not right. Maybe what if that really was Jony? Or you know, really his PA. So then I had to get it out of the trash.
Turned out it was actually Jony's PA and he set up a FaceTime call. And Jony said to me, “you know, I'm just wanting to let you know, I'm buying the LP12 and Klimax DSM. I’ve been following the company and I love the design of the products. I love the sound of the products. I just wanted to meet you and tell you that I love what the company does and everything about it. And so, we just chatted, and then he said, "you know, if there's ever any way I could help or get involved, I'd love to.”
And I said, well, next year is the 50th anniversary of the Sondek LP12 turntable. And he said, okay, let me think about that. And the next morning, I had an email from him saying I would love to help you design a 50th Anniversary turntable!
And, you know, he's introduced me to so many people as well. And he's taken these LP12 50th Anniversary and sprinkled them around some great people who have become Linn customers. It's a limited edition piece. We're only ever going to make a maximum of 250 and we build them to order.
With Linn, you're not just buying a product. You're buying into an ecosystem, you're buying into a company that is family-owned and committed to a long-term future, unlike these private, equity-backed companies that are just looking to grow and sell. So, we've built an enormous amount of trust in the industry with our distributors, our retailers, and our customers, who after 51 years on, understand this company's seriousness.

Considering that you’re still manufacturing almost every component in-house, it must give you a huge advantage over competitors when it comes to rapid prototyping and testing out new designs.
There has to be a symbiotic relationship between design and manufacturing. If you can't make it, there's no point designing it. You shouldn’t design something that you can't make; everything has to be done in harmony. So when we made the new Klimax DSM, at the same time, we invested in CNC machining. For the Organic DAC, we invested in the latest surface mount technology. It also helps us during global crises like COVID; the world stopped, and there were no components available. But we were making these carousel bearings and selling them like crazy for the first six months!
Does it ever get too demanding to keep up with the market changes and align resources accordingly?
We want to make the Selekt DSM upgrade once a year. We want to make sure the Klimax range is always moving higher and higher. We want to make sure the Majik has a good pace with new models because that's needed more at that end of the market. So we create these kinds of guiding principles, and our head of R&D then decides how to allocate the resources. He will allocate the resources in such a way that people are working across projects because we don't want people only working on the same thing. The best we have are people who can work across as the more time they spend at Linn, the more they know, the more they are able to contribute. Say from speaker to turntable to amplifier because it depends on what's required, but we do need electronic and software engineers who can work on turntables. We need all of the different disciplines to be able to cross-fertilize across different types of products that we make.

Streamlining resources and a multi-disciplinary workforce has helped Linn to take on some real challenges upon itself in the quest for bespoke solutions. And using an FPGA to create your own DAC from scratch is no mean feat, especially for an analog-first company.
When I joined in 2004-5, we started work towards what we called Core One, and it was productized in 2007 for the first time with Klimax DS. Today, we're on Core Four, and the FPGA market has gotten much better. The first FPGA we used was a thousand dollars. That same FPGA would be five dollars now, and it would also be way, way better. The engineers that we're working with don't worry about the cost even if it's a thousand dollars. Because by the time we launch the product, it's already going to be a hundred. And then a couple of years later, it'll be fifty dollars. So that's how it went. So we just took the best FPGA. We needed our own FPGA because the off-the-shelf solutions at the time couldn't stream real-time 24-bit audio. And our number one requirement, our only requirement really, was 24-bit audio because that's what we knew would sell.

Which we can all attest to and concur that has become the biggest digital buzzword in recent history
Yes, so ultimately what we have today are three completely different propositions in streaming. The Klimax DSM, which we believe is without doubt the highest performing streamer on the market. It’s of course not even remotely the most expensive, but we think it's the best. Selekt DSM is the only one on the market with its modular, upgradable approach, and the enthusiasts love the future-proofing and keep coming back, same as the LP12. The Selekt DSM and the Magik DSM are simple one-box solutions and the first Hi-Fi system from Linn that has an amplifier also built in. In case somebody wants just a one-box solution.
And you think India is ready for Linn and its school of music?
Going back to your first question about market development, in the early stage of the Hi-Fi market, the stores are full of products on shelves. It's really confusing for the customer. You need this box, this box, this box. That's how the Hi-Fi market starts. I think when you're starting off as an audiophile, your journey into audiophilia, so to speak, people want to show off more boxes in their room because it just looks more serious and expensive. It's an early stage in the market. In the more mature markets, people just say, “Well, actually, I want the performance and the simplicity.”