The toxic relationship between price, discount and perceived value.
By Roy Gregory

When it comes to system architecture and design, budget has always been an overriding and unavoidable concern, leading to long debates about how exactly that budget should be allocated. In the dawn of the high-fidelity era, conventional wisdom and common practice was to spend the lion’s share of the available funds on the loudspeakers – as it’s the speakers that actually make the noise. Although that argument made little sense, it did in many respects reflect the reality of the situation on the ground. With limited power available from the contemporary amplification, speakers were necessarily large and often complex in order to deliver useable sensitivity – resulting in costly cabinet work and an elevated final price. At the same time, those flea-powered amps were generally placed inside fancy cabinets, meaning that their external finish (a major cost contributor to modern designs) could be rather more industrial.
Then came Ivor Tiefenbrun, the LP12 and the front-end first philosophy. He argued, as any chain is only as strong as its weakest link and as once you’ve lost information you can never get it back, you should be spending the (vast) majority of your budget on the record player, less on the amps and less again on the speakers. Indeed, the philosophy was imposed so dogmatically that plenty of dealers were telling customers not to upgrade their speakers at all, until they had the best possible front-end and amps. If that sounds weird, it’s because it is: but not as weird as all those active Linn Kann systems that resulted! That’s a full LP12 turntable, Ittok tonearm and ASAK cartridge, a Naim NAC32 pre-amp, SNAPS power supply, NAXO crossover and a pair of flagship NAP 250 power amps, all to play records through a pair of speakers the size of LS3/5as. Yet, once again, the engineering and electrical reality helped to underpin the logic, making it demonstrable and thus unquestionable. How so? Well, the chain analogy is of course correct (and appealingly so) yet the apparently logical explanation obscures the underlying factors that affect the outcome.
Hidden truths
What really established the logic is the nature of the components themselves. A turntable is a light-engineering challenge with certain irreducible material and production costs, especially back when everything was hand-machined. Throw in an imported tonearm and cartridge, both built in Japan, and you’ve got an inherently expensive package. But the thing that really tipped the balance was the nature of the speakers, especially the Isobarik and Sara, with their low efficiency and crippling impedance characteristics, characteristics that demanded amplifiers with massive (and thus expensive) power supplies. Amplifiers that, in the UK at least, simply didn’t exist amongst the mainstream, mainly Japanese offerings. Yes, the full Linn front-end delivered a superior signal and, yes, the loudspeakers imposed a heavy cost on the amplifier design, so that any attempt to run less capable electronics was ruthlessly revealed. As a result – and for years afterwards, both the chain analogy and the front-end first philosophy have remained current, a part if not the whole of the debate.