First impressions inside the building are of a unique relaxed atmosphere.  From all subsequent experiences of chatting to the diverse staff, what becomes clear is: Linn is about heart, family, music, precision engineering, and streamlined business systems.

The building is located on a fifteen acre estate of gentle hills and tall woodland that’s eleven kilometres south of the centre of Glasgow, a modern cultured city with a strong engineering tradition.  This largest of Scottish cities was a key production centre in the mid 1800s, when Britain was responsible for half the world's industrial production.  These heritage roots clearly run strong at Linn.

A personal tour with a member of staff is booked by simply clicking the Visit Linn link at the bottom of Linn’s homepage.

This tour became extended, and quite unique for several reasons, as I was very fortunate that this revelatory journey around these premises included several activities not on the typical tour; as in addition to the usual trip around the three main manufacturing areas: metalworking, circuit board population, and assembly, I also got to see what they were up to in research and development, have an in-depth conversation with Managing Director Gilad Tiefenbrun, and even visit that most infamous room at the very top of the building.

Shared here is what I saw and discovered on this tour of Linn.

As my taxi from the city centre meandered along the main road between the villages of Waterfoot and Eaglesham, in a sudden dramatic instant I noticed the distinctive building, clearly visible even from a distance atop a hill, on the other side of the grassy field next to the road.  This initial impression was striking.  After another few looks the building soon became comfortingly familiar; perhaps it was the thought that soon, finally, I will be there, in Linn’s home.  Seeing the multistorey glass structure was also clearly notice that we were close to the turning off the Glasgow Road onto the sprawling estate. We soon turned right, and this white and clean piece of architecture started growing ever larger through the car’s window.

While the people at Linn are key, both the building, and the location, are very special.

The location itself is particularly unique for a hi-fi company; it’s beautiful, peaceful, and enchanting.  This superb woodland estate is the best of 48 sites investigated over five years by Linn’s founder Ivor Tiefenbrun.  One of the key advantages of this locale, as well as its amazing views, …

…is that being just outside the city, staff have a much more relaxed journey to and from work, in the opposite direction to most other commuters.

And then there’s the building.  The word factory seems woefully inadequate, regular visitors simply refer to it as HQ.  This showpiece headquarters is a multi-award-winning architectural masterpiece.  Everything about this place whispers it’s special: two parts glass cathedral, three parts futuristic space station, one part Bond film set.  The combination of futuristic metal-glass structures surrounded by lush countryside and tall trees also makes James Cameron’s Avatar springs to mind.  The building’s style looks modern, as if built recently, yet it was built in the late 1980s, so is over a quarter of a century old.

The building was designed by Sir Richard Rogers and his Partnership, a team famed for their public buildings, large airport terminals and international corporate headquarters; the most iconic being London’s Lloyds building and Paris’s Pompidou centre.

Ivor wanted all staff equally united, in a light, spacious, multi-functional building that was flexible and 100% expandable, with expansive views of the surrounding countryside.

The original part of the building is a structure of two interconnected rectangular blocks: a high-ceiling multi-functional multi-storey for production, assembly and administration; and a second smaller blue building housing a fully automated warehouse. 

True to its original design the building’s repetitive structure have allowed for seamless expansion by the addition of two wings.  And since 2008 it has been Linn’s sole home, when all operations were integrated here to eliminate inter-site transportation spending, and thus reduce costs.  The original Drakemire Drive factory, opposite Linn Park, was sold to the company run by Ivor’s father and brother, Castle Precision, who make precision components for Rolls Royce aircraft engines and oil drilling platforms.

Inside the Linn building the internal doors have circular porthole windows (Ivor likes boating).  Some interior walls have large circular windows, enabling staff in different areas to easily see each other; these windows are made of large semi-circular glass, thus hinting at Linn’s stylus-on-a-record logo. 

A WARM RECEPTION

My training career has involved visiting dozens of organisations in over twenty countries around the world, so I've become very good at walking into a building and rapidly sensing the calibre of a business, what the company is really like.

“Welcome to Linn” and my name were displayed on the large TV above a hi-fi in reception.  This was just the first taste that I was about to be treated like royalty.

From behind the reception desk I was warmly greeted by two friendly and articulate ladies.  From chatting it quickly became clear they’re also involved in several other aspects of the business; Linn are big on unique insights coming from staff being multiply skilled.  Also Linn’s staff retention is very high.  The current average is twenty years.  The longest serving staff member’s been here 38 years.  Those who’ve only been here ten years still considered themselves new.

I had arrived a couple of hours earlier than my tour start time, in order to photograph the outside of the building in the dry, as rain had been forecast for the afternoon.  My guide Stephen was in a meeting.  This gave me time to relax in a chair and enjoy the exquisite quality of the music, and the wood veneer, of their top-of-the-range one-box-and-two-speakers system playing in reception, their new Klimax Exakt system.

Linn currently make four ranges of products (named using the usual Linn-guistics of spelling a hard-c with a “k”): Klimax, Akurate, Majik and a few other entry-level products like Sneaky and Kiko.  Exakt is Linn’s new huge technological achievement: a hi-fi that keeps the signal path digital all the way through to the active crossovers, crossovers that also correct for phase distortion, drive-unit manufacturing variation, and room optimisation issues such as speaker placement and room nodes.

Surprisingly the streamer is connected to the speakers using standard cat-5 computer networking cable.

While I sat and relaxed to music I also noticed occasionally someone would walk through this part of the building, to get to another, as here is the main staircase of this enterprise.  The place feels relaxed, familiar, formal yet friendly.  The music lovers that work here are clearly as much a family as they are an exacting cohesive professional team.

Stephen soon appeared, and given the time of day suggested we have lunch in the legendary Linn canteen at the top of the building.  I’ve heard that this is where the people that build the products meet and discuss with the design staff about how they see the products can be improved.  I’d also heard that this place is famous for its curries, and I was in luck as today was curry day.  It was also the day after the Linn Christmas dinner, where Managing Director Gilad Tiefenbrun and the Finance Director had been behind the counter serving up the Christmas lunches.  I got to have a very tasty Chinese chicken curry, and there were still some of yesterday’s succulent mince pies too.

The room seats about fifty at six tables.  We sat with two young ladies who are partly responsible for making Linn famous.  As both worked in Linn Records, the award-winning record label set up in 1982, in part to discover what is captured in a recording studio, and thus exactly what it is a hi-fi should reproduce.  We talked about a wide range of subjects, including travelling to several countries around the world.  Eventually we get round to the subjects of music and hi-fi; they were curious to find out my listening preferences regarding vinyl and high quality digital.  After the delicious lunch Stephen and I descended the whole length of the red staircase to start the tour proper.

THE STORY STARTS HERE

Linn’s products are made in an electrostatic-discharge-free zone that’s not far off of being a clean-room.  Thus the tour starts with us donning a white jacket to limit static electricity build-up.

And a grounding strap on the sole of one shoe.

As we walked through the ground floor doors to the metalworking area Stephen told me how Linn started.

When Ivor got married, he was given money to start his home: furniture and place settings etc.  Ivor spent most of the money on a top hi-fi.  He also found it disappointing.  He returned to the shop, they recommended better speakers, then a better amp.  Still dissatisfied he asked about the turntable and was told the turntable didn’t make a difference.  Intuitively this seemed wrong to him.  So Ivor started experimenting, including putting his turntable outside the living room and running the cables under the door.  This sounded better.  Then with colleagues at his father’s engineering company he developed a turntable that used existing design elements and components, but for very different reasons, such as for acoustic isolation rather than shock resistance.  And thus the Linn Sondek LP12 was born.

PRODUCTS — PART ONE: CASEWORK

Practically all products are made in-house (their top cartridge is hand made by one very senior gentleman in Japan).

Most products consist of a case with circuit boards inside.  On the ground floor of the main building is most of Linn’s metalworking machinery.  When an order comes in from a shop, it’s entered into their system, and that order comes here.

This rack consists of large sheets of aluminium of various thickness; different product ranges have cases of different thicknesses.

This machine cuts from a single sheet, the cases and other parts for typically eight products.  The sheet is then put on the table, a light tap and all the parts come out.

The cases are finished in a grinding machine.

The final case…

…is folded by hand using a machine, as Linn find this the most consistently accurate method.

Inserts are added to screw circuit boards down securely.

Next is a sequence of washes.  First a water and Grenadine wash to degrease and act as a catalyst for the bonding process.  The next washes are water.  Products are then dried.

Cases are then hung on a conveyer belt for their journey through the powder-coating machine.

The finished products…

…are then ready to have their products names and legally required safely information added via screen-printing with the relevant template…

…and the appropriate amount of pressure applied…

…to give the finished result.

Nearby in a clean-room tonearms are hand assembled.

PRODUCTS — PART TWO: CIRCUIT BOARDS

The first floor of the main building consists of two high-ceiling rooms.  The first is the circuit board production area.  All circuit boards are surface mount in order to shorten circuit paths and thus increase audio performance.

Here two identical production lines lead to a single inspection stage at the end.

Both lines start by putting a circuit board…

…through a machine that places small components.  The strips of tape contain components from other manufacturers.  Linn don’t test components individually for quality at this stage.

Linn find they get the most reliable results by running this machine slightly slower than its 8,000 components per hour peak.  A quality improvement also made with the second machine, which can place up to 6,000 medium sized components an hour.

Through the large internal windows, the huge main hall can be seen.

THE MAIN ASSEMBLY AREA

This hall is most of the building.  The large high ceiling room has the quiet relaxed focussed atmosphere of an airplane factory, only with high quality music gently playing from above.

This is also where the famous robots work, serving the staff.  They deliver pallets of components to staff workstations and later finished products back to the automated warehouse.  These robots move around on the blue areas of the floor.

First we went to a machine that solders the largest components, especially those with many pins, and watched the machine at work.

All boards are individually tested on nearby equipment before being put into a product.  Almost all pass, with a small percentage failing due to third-party component failure.  As the failure rate is so low it is cheaper to test for component failure at this stage rather than test every individual bought-in component.

This hall is also home to Linn’s CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) machine.

This uses various cutting tools…

…to carefully cut various components from solid billets of aircraft grade aluminium.  While I was there it was working on some bases for some floor-standing speakers.

Recently it had finished the base of a Klimax case…

… that would then go on to be anodised and then screen-printed.

PRODUCT ASSEMBLY

Most of this hall is set out for assembling products using an approach called single-stage build.

Early on in Linn’s history Ivor bought a computer system to better automate their production line.  This led to many long nights and failed attempts to get the streamlined results they wanted.  One morning Ivor asked a woman on the production line to go and get all the parts for a turntable, assemble it, and bring it to his office.  She arrived 19 minutes later with a working record player.  As it took 29 minutes to make the product on the production line, the line approach, with all of its buffer-stages, was scraped in favour of the single stage build that’s been used ever since.  Thus a single person assembles, tests and packs each Linn product.  From talking to the staff that were building products, it’s clear the level of pride and self-fulfilment they feel is huge.  Staff also cross-train to assemble any product, and thus keep their jobs interesting.

Being assembled here is a Klimax streaming product, so far fitted with two circuit boards: its covered switch-mode power-supply and front display.  Linn have spent over a million pounds developing audio grade switch-mode power supplies (a technology used in the computing industry for decades) as they can supply a thousand watts in a very small space, thus enabling much smaller powerful products.

Here in the final stages of assembly is a streamer, pre-amplifier and power amp in a single product.

Being Christmas the workstations are decorated with lots of cards.  I assumed these were from other members of staff.  They’re not.  As all products are labelled with the name of who built it, these cards are from grateful customers who send Xmas cards to the people who made their hi-fi.  This workstation has at the back one such opened card that hadn’t yet been put up.

After assembling, a product is given an overall automatic test.

Here, held in place on small white feet, is an entry level integrated streamer and amplifier product in the final stages of being put through all its paces in a twelve minute test.

I wait a minute, and it passes.

Of course, there is also some workstations nearby where each year hundreds of Linn’s primogenital product, the industry-transforming Sondek LP12, are built…

…and tested.

Loudspeakers are built similarly.  While I was there a black pair of their entry-level 40 litre floorstanders, Majik 140, were in the latter stages of assembly.

Speakers are tested using special equipment built to hold each speaker.  Here’s the test rig for their top of the range Klimax 350 speakers.

The large black machine in the background Linn bought recently to measure the huge B&W Nautilus loudspeaker, and other large speakers in the future, in order to develop an appropriate Exakt digital crossover.

HERE BE ROBOTS

Once assembled, tested and packed, products are put on the robotic vehicles.

The large clear plastic loop on the front of all three robots is a front bumper, so they immediately stop and slightly reverse if they touch something, or someone.

These robots deliver the finished products to the back of the hall where they are either stored in the automated warehouse…

…or sent upstairs to the shipping department for immediate posting to the shops.

The shipping department’s balcony being where the iconic pictures are taken of the factory’s main assembly area.

While we were in the ordering area, Gilad Tiefenbrun, as well as Linn’s Technical Director and a senior software engineer walked along the main floor below us and came up the stairs.  Stephen introduced me to this friendly three.

Gilad spoke to me about a wide range of topics.  He knew the current dealer situation in my city in Australia.  He also clearly has a very detailed grasp of a diverse range of subjects and issues, including the music industry and current technological trends.  Linn’s Exakt speakers are designed to be cloud accessing Internet citizens.  Gilad also has a very clear vision for what Linn needs to do next, one aspect of which is to create the tools to make it easy for other speaker manufactures to reap the various sonic and business benefits of Exakt technology.  As an individual Gilad is clearly very focussed and extremely knowledgeable on what is going on in all areas of the business, and he is on par with the best CEOs I’ve met.  Linn is clearly still in exemplary hands.

LEADERSHIP

Surprisingly it’s against extremely strong odds that Gilad is now running Linn.  Ivor decided that as manufacturing is a very tough business, he didn’t want any of his children following him into the industry.

However, Gilad seems to have had other ideas.

All three of Ivor’s children worked in the factory during school holidays; there are Lingo power supplies labelled as being assembled by GT.  Ivor suggested Gilad study engineering, as it was a good general education.  After graduating in electronics and electrical engineering from Edinburgh University, and more holidays and a year working in the factory, eventually Gilad moved to London, working on Avid film/TV digital editing equipment.  Then he became a software manager in the highly talented software start-up, Symbian, that in 1998 instigated the now multi-billion-dollar industry of modern camera-and-internet-enabled mobilephones.  Then Gilad was considering moving to Nokia in Vancouver.  Gilad had even bet a friend he wouldn’t join Linn.

However, back at Linn, the Director of Engineering role had been vacant for six months, and Ivor kept calling to suggest that as Gilad could do the job he should apply.  But Gilad wasn’t interested in the role.  Eventually after six months of no suitable candidates coming forward Gilad applied.  Ivor wasn’t involved in the hiring decision.  And the person who was, thought Gilad too young.  However after the interview Gilad was by far the best candidate.  A few talented people from Symbian went on to work for Google in London; five came to Linn.

Then, after half a decade in the role, including successes like integrated-active speakers and the range of streaming products, Gilad had also clearly proven himself ready to step up into the role of Managing Director.

OFFICES

As mentioned, the original building has had a north and a south wing added in 2003.

Upstairs of the north wing is one large open plan office with some meeting rooms.  The first desks on the left are the ordering department, where orders come in from shops; mostly by email, some UK shops phone, occasionally they still get a fax.  Also here is marketing, sales, Linn Records, and at the far end Gilad and Ivor’s desks.  Ivor is still involved a little, and pops in a few days a week.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

This key department is downstairs in the north wing.  I read years ago that all of Linn’s profits go into R&D.  Here there were lots of speakers, all lined up ready to be measured so Exakt crossovers and driver variation correction can be developed.

There was also a test of ten LP12 motors that has been running continuously 24x365 for 6 years.

Another advantage of setting up Linn Records was learning that classical musicians use what they call active listening.  Which is now used by the R&D staff to evaluate the products they are developing.  Linn call it the shorter name Tune-Dem.  This is the simple act of, as you listen, simultaneously repeating the tune in your mind.  The easier it is to follow the tune, the more accurate the product is at music reproduction.

Upstairs in the south wing is a large hall used for large gatherings.

LINN’S SHOW HOME

Downstairs in the south wing I am treated to a visit to the Linn Home.

This show-home demonstrates Linn’s vision of how their products can be used in a modern home (if only IKEA was this delightful).  This five room open-plan home consists of a kitchen, dining area, lounge, office and bedroom, each with their own one-box two-speaker hi-fi.  Linn use this to demonstrate to shops how their products can be used, and also to have open music events for locals to come and experience quality music in a home setting.

In the dining area were their new Exakt Akudorik speakers, which are by far the best bookshelf sized speakers I’ve ever heard.  I say bookshelf sized as the stands contain the Exakt engine and power amplifiers for these active speakers.

Finally we went to a nearby demonstration room that had their top active system, an Klimax Exakt system with eight 500 Watt single-channel Klimax Solo power amplifiers.  We played both their top streamer and a 40th anniversary LP12, with a wooden plinth made from a high-density sherry oak Whisky cask.  We finished by playing a 24-bit copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.  After the last track finished, we could clearly hear, leaking through the wall of the Abbey Road recording studio, a symphony orchestra in the studio next door playing The Beatles’ Penny Lane.  I’ve never ever heard that before.

A taxi was ordered, and kindly put on Linn’s account, to take me back to my hotel.

I left with two things: a card to download a free 18-track studio master collection of Linn Record recordings, and also something much more important.  Deeply cherished happy memories.

For more information visit Linn