Tempe Room 1

The first room in Tempe, and a deliberate pairing of two quite different ideas about how a system should be built. One is conventional and Italian-led. The other is all-Linn, entirely active, and removes a component most people assume every loudspeaker has to contain. Hearing those two approaches in the same room, on the same music, is a more useful hour than any amount of reading about either.

The room itself

Room 1 is the first door off the Tempe floor and the first place most visitors sit down, which is why the two systems in it were chosen to frame a decision rather than to overwhelm. Neither is a flagship. Both are complete, and both are sized for the kind of room a real house has. The question the room is built to answer is not how much can be spent, but which way of building a system suits the listener — and that is a better first question than the usual one.

System 1 — Sonus faber Olympica Nova on McIntosh MA352

A two-way Sonus faber system built around the Olympica Nova V, with the Nova II available alongside it so the difference a larger cabinet makes can be heard directly rather than described. The Olympica line is the point in the Sonus faber catalogue where the lute-shaped cabinet and the hand-finished walnut start doing real acoustic work rather than only looking the part.

Amplification is the McIntosh MA352 — a hybrid integrated pairing a vacuum tube preamplifier stage with a solid-state output section. It is McIntosh’s answer to the question of whether you have to choose between tube character and solid-state grip, and in this room the answer is audible rather than theoretical. Source duty falls to a Linn Akurate DS network player, with Transparent MusicWave cabling and a McIntosh MPC500 power controller feeding the rack.

System 2 — Linn Exakt active

An all-Linn system, and the clearest demonstration in Tempe of what Exakt actually does. In a conventional system the signal is converted to analogue, amplified, and then split by a passive crossover inside the loudspeaker — after the amplifier has already done its work. Exakt keeps the signal digital until the last possible moment, performs the crossover in the digital domain, and sends each drive unit its own dedicated amplified feed. The passive crossover disappears entirely.

Here that runs through a Linn Akurate Exakt DSM and a Majik Exaktbox-I into Linn 150 floor-standers and 119 stand-mounts, with a JL Audio Dominion d110 subwoofer extending the bottom end and Kimber Kable throughout. Because the crossover is software rather than coils and capacitors, it can be corrected for the room and for the specific drive units in these specific cabinets — which is the part of Exakt that is hardest to explain and easiest to hear.

Two systems, one question

The reason these two sit together is that they answer the same brief in opposite ways. The Sonus faber and McIntosh system is the familiar architecture done properly: a good source, an amplifier with real character, a loudspeaker with a passive crossover designed by people who know what they are doing. The Linn system removes the crossover, removes the separate amplifier, and asks the listener to accept that a digital signal path can be the purer one.

Neither is the right answer for everyone. Someone who wants a rack they can change over time, one component at a time, will usually gravitate to the first. Someone who wants the least possible between a file and a drive unit — and who is comfortable with the system being a system rather than a collection of boxes — will often prefer the second. Room 1 exists so that preference can be formed by listening rather than by argument.

The systems in this room

• Sonus faber Olympica Nova V and Olympica Nova II loudspeakers
• McIntosh MA352 hybrid integrated amplifier
• Linn Akurate DS network music player
• Transparent MusicWave cabling and McIntosh MPC500 power controller
• Linn 150 floor-standing and Linn 119 stand-mount Exakt loudspeakers
• Linn Akurate Exakt DSM and Majik Exaktbox-I
• JL Audio Dominion d110 subwoofer
• Kimber Kable cabling

Hearing it

Room 1 is the right first stop for anyone assembling a first serious system, and a useful second stop for anyone who has owned conventional separates for years and wants to hear what an active digital chain does differently. It is also a sensible place to bring a piece of music that has always felt slightly out of reach on a familiar system, because the two approaches tend to reveal different things about the same recording.

Tempe Room 1 is in the Tempe showroom. Walk in during business hours and ask to hear it, or book ahead if you would like both systems set up and the time to move between them properly.