Posted by Naitze Teng on 10/08/05 01:34

From the October edition of AVRev.com...

Linn Unidisk 1.1 Universal Player

Introduction

The world of ultra-high-end audio has had to adjust their business model
quite a bit over the last decade. With technology developing in new and
exciting ways, equipment manufacturers clamored to produce real-world
digital products that would support the new emerging software formats when,
historically, high-end audio was an industry based around excellence more in
analog (preamps, amps, speakers, turntables) products. While most of the
high-end equipment manufacturers steered clear of machines that supported
future and uncertain formats, Linn Products, a company known for taking bold
and adventurous steps in the name of uncompromised sound, took new audio
formats for music and movies as a challenge. Not surprising, considering
that Linn produced and sold, very successfully I might add, one of the
world¹s best and most expensive dedicated CD player at $20,000.

Linn¹s solution to the ever-growing need for a universal high-end player,
which can unite all aspects of optical disc playback, is the Unidisk 1.1
universal player, priced at $10,995.

At the heart of the Unidisk 1.1 is the Silverdisk Engine, the digital brains
of the Unidisk product line, which gives the player universal disc
recognition. This includes CD, CD-R, CD-RW, Video CD, SVCD, DVD-Video and
DVD-Audio, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW, SACD, DTS CDs, and even
copy-protected MP3, MPEG2 and JPEG discs. The Linn Silverdisk Engine turns
off the circuitry not required for that particular format, maintaining a
clean signal path for each decoding scheme, all in the digital domain. The
analog section shares no common component of the digital side, keeping both
signal paths unadulterated. This is where most universal players get into
trouble. CD performance on these units tends to be the last in the food
chain in my experience.

Read the full review at http://www.audiorevolution.com/equip/linnunidisk/

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