Scottish hi-fi company Linn adopted a radically new approach...

Scottish hi-fi company Linn adopted a radically new approach for products it debuts, unveiled at a London briefing Tuesday. Its new Akurate Exaktbox corrects for room acoustics and speaker positioning, not just with all Linn speakers, but other brands of speakers as well, Linn said. For the London event, Linn’s demonstrators used a pair of B&W Nautilus speakers and Linn’s new compact Akudorik units. They acknowledged that they could not recall ever before demonstrating Linn hardware with a competitor’s product. The Akurate Exaktbox is software-configured, with a dropdown menu that lists all suitable speakers. The original analog crossover in the speaker is bypassed and the Akurate Exaktbox performs the crossover digitally and optimizes sound for the room. The speakers are run actively, with separate amplifiers for each drive unit. Linn claims this eliminates magnitude and phase distortion. The 24-bit/192 kHz signal is carried by Cat 5 cable, using a proprietary protocol -- Exakt Link -- rather than Ethernet. Ten channels of digital-to-analog conversion handle a stereo pair of speakers with five drivers each. Exaktbox has 13 inputs, including an RCA phono jack, such as for a turntable. Exakt Akudorik is a new compact speaker with the Exakt electronics housed in its floor-standing column. A pair costs nearly $29,000. The London demonstration showed Exakt to provide a clearly audible improvement in bass and imaging when the speakers were moved from the acoustically ideal but family-unfriendly position that is away from a room wall, to an acoustically un-ideal, but visually neater, position that is close to a wall.