The Linn Organik is a very interesting product, also very expensive, but it does have streaming (including Roon) and speaker/room correction capability built in. And optical ethernet, HDMI, and plenty more.
I think Linn nowadays is a very different company than Chord and has been for a decade now.
Both started out as heavy engineering companies that produce state of the art products that they know how to make with the focus on optimal audio quality.
But over time, Linn devoted more and more of its engineering resources into all-in-one systems and focussed more on solving what my favorite photography blogger Thom Hogan calls ”user problems”: wanting an HDMI input, wanting high-end optical Ethernet, speaker/room correction capability, or even having 1 box instead of multiple boxes.
Whereas Chord devoted its efforts to solving audio engineering problems that users don’t even realize they have: transient and timbral accuracy, noise floor modulation. This is why IMHO, Chord products sound better.
The problem with the Chord approach is that just because the product is better, the users may not appreciate the improvement, as evidenced by all the forum posts that says Chord DACs are nothing special. We see this with some Apple products too. Chord (and sometimes Apple) are basically solving “user problems“ that users don’t even know they have. But there is no guarantee users would appreciate these solutions. Audio is particularly hard because our ears can get used to anything. I’d be perfectly happy listening to music on my iPhone speakers, even with all its distortions. Moreover, by not selling all-in-one products, Chord is at the mercy of customers pairing their Chord products with pretty much anything else which may have noise floor modulations (class D amplifiers), electronics with poor transient accuracy and distortions, etc. And no customers liked to be told that what they current own is “problematic” or that their ears are so used to distorted sound that they can’t hear the difference. So they’d rather say, well Chord DACs sound like everything else, because on their system, they can’t hear the difference.
Whereas user problems that users recognize, like not having an all-in-one box, no speaker/room correction, no HDMI input, no 5GHz WiFi in an apartment where there is lots of 2.4GHz WiFi are problems that users can readily point to that they might feel Chord is not solving for them.
Linn is also smart in that it insists most of the time that their dealer network really supports their products and dedicate rooms to their products. At least that’s at the stores where I’ve seen Linn products (Vancouver & Montreal). Whereas most Chord dealers who pair them with speakers often stock lots of other brands and allow users to mix and match whatever they want (because that’s how people buy components). Imagine pairing an amplifier with low SNR or high harmonic distortion with Chord DAC vs pretty much any other DAC, you’re not going to hear as much of a difference/improvements.
I think it is also why Chord is much more successful in the headphone space because at most headphone stores, the demo is your portable battery powered device into Chord DAC vs other DACs into your headphones. There are significantly fewer variables that deteriorates the sound.
But ultimately, why can’t Chord do both what Chord is currently doing and what some of Linn is doing? My take is that you only have so much engineering resource. So you can devote it to say creating 2Go & 2Yu as your optimal streamer solution but you’ll have to forego adding 5GHz wifi, Bluetooth AAC support, HDMI input, room and speaker correction, etc. Moreover, adding these user-desired features may mean audio performance compromises which Chord doesn’t want.
Moreover, users are finicky. I might want 5GHz WiFi and Bluetooth AAC support in Hugo 2 & 2Go, but I might not want to pay for HDMI input and room/speaker correction. You might want to pay for room+speaker correction and optical Ethernet but you don’t want to pay for 5GHz Wifi & Bluetooth AAC support. So what is a company supposed to make? And how much does the company charge?
The worst I have heard from many companies is that they would do an online poll on forums like ours and they’ll get all of us saying we would totally buy whatever product for a specific price with a specific feature set so in their polls, they can estimate that 10,000 will buy the product and when the actual product comes out, only 100 people would buy it, even though in the forums, at least 500 people said they would. Just because we say here we want a specific product at a specific price doesn’t mean when the product comes out we actually pay for it.
Another aspect to me that is interesting specifically about speaker and room correction is that Linn and Devialet (or even Dirac/Audyssey) never sells the product as “your room and your speakers and your speaker/listening seat positioning are crap” so you need our products to make things better because that antagonizes customers. It’s always “our products can make your great speakers and room sound even better”. Except of course, simple logic tells you that you can’t digitally correct everything that’s physically wrong acoustically with your system. For instance, Devialet allows you to dial in how much speaker correction (and the bass frequency response) you want to engage because all digital room/speaker correction are a compromise.
At the end of the day, I’m very happy listening to music from my Chord system right now (with digital convolution filters in Roon to correct my speaker/room issues). I’m grateful for the products that Chord makes. I think it’s a tough market. I hope they continue to succeed. And for others who prefer other brands and are happy with their stereo systems (or headphones), kudos to them.
