Hi-Rez Highway: Heard the Linn Unidisk 1.1 last night by Skip

I attended a Linn demo last night at the Gifted Listener in Centreville, VA. The Linn rep. was on his way back from CES, and had the Unidisk 1.1 demo unit they used at the show. This was hooked up to an all-Linn system (stereo only), Espek speakers with what I believe was an AV51 for the preamp and a pair of Klimax Twin amplifiers. The player was evidently not fully functional, during the demo they had to try a couple of times to get it to play a DVD-A in stereo mode. They said that this particular unit did not have video capability, either. Production units are expected around April.

The demo started with a live Nils Lofgrin cut on CD, "Keith Don't Go", that was mostly acoustic guitar and vocals. He played the entire song, and then the first half again so we could become more familiar with it, then repeated the first half again at matching volume (calculated with an SPL meter before they started) on the Linn Ikemi. The Unidisk was better at straight CD. I am not particularly familiar with the Ikemi, but several people on this forum prefer the Ikemi to a number of SACD players for Redbook, so I thought this was worth mentioning.

Next came a Rolling Stones hybrid disk, I think "Country Honk" from Let It Bleed. First the CD layer, then the same song on SACD (both on the Unidisk), which was much better, no surprise there.

For DVD-A we listened to the beginning of the Eagles' Hotel California. The stereo mix was certainly different from what I am used to, and others listening made the same comment. Aside from the mix, the sounds of the instruments and the vocals were extremely detailed, not at all CD-like. His comment was that the multi-channel DVD-As remind him of the early stereo recording, such as the Beatles, with John and Paul in one speaker and George and Ringo in the other. He said that he had no real preference of one format over the other in the technical sense, but that most of the DVD-A titles he had heard seemed to have strange mixes. At this point his preference as far at the music goes is for SACD. This was the first time that I had heard DVD-A.

I had to leave the room for a few minutes, when I came back they were just finishing up a short comparison between CD on the Unidisk and the Linn Sondek CD12. The Linn rep. admitted that the CD 12 was better than the Unidisk in this regard, but noted that this should not be a surprise since the Unidisk cost about half of what the CD12 costs (the exact price has not been set yet).

They then took the CD12 out of the system and put it back in another room where it is set up with the top of the line Linn hardware. I would have liked to hear the comparison of the Unidisk on SACD to the CD12 on CD. This will have to wait until the shop gets one later this year.