CES 2015

Gilad Tiefenbrun, Managing Director of Linn Products (above), along with the Scottish company's Technical Director Keith Robertson, gave me a convincing demonstration of Linn's Exakt system. Like Edgar Choueiri's Bacch-SP, this powerful DSP-based system decouples the loudspeakers from the perceived sounds. It does so, not to create an immersive, binaural soundfield, but rather to eliminate problems with the behavior of the speakers' drive-units, correct errors in the speakers' performance as a whole, and optimize their relationship with a room’s acoustics. According to Linn, "Exakt pushes the lossless digital signal path all the way to the speaker," turning the loudspeaker into "an intelligent, connected, software-upgradeable product. This enables a wide range of performance- and personalisation-enhancing capabilities in design, in manufacture and in your home."

The Exakt system accepts audio data via an Ethernet connection and is processed by a powerful DSP engine before feeding corrected and digitally crossed-over data via multiple analog outputs to feed active speakers. Models for Linn's own drive-units and loudspeakers can be downloaded from the cloud into the unit's firmware and Linn intends to develop models for other multi-amped speakers. (Gilad mentioned B&W's Nautilus as an example.)

But it doesn't stop there. The DSP engine can apply room correction, but with a twist. Rather than measure the listener's room, Linn dealers will measure the room and feed its dimensions and things like the acoustic behavior of the wall surfaces into a modeling app to generate the optimization parameters. But what of the owner can't put the speakers in the optimal positions in the room? Once Linn's Exakt has optimized the acoustic performance for the optimal positions, the speakers can moved, say, to be close to the wall or to the corners and the DSP firmware can be updated to counteract the changes in position.

Gilad and Keith demonstrated this for me, first playing me a pair of Exakt-optimized standmounts in the best positions in the room, then moving them back so that they were adjacent to the screen and armoire shown in my photo. To my astonishment, in AB comparisons there was no appreciable change in either the speakers' tonal color or imaging!