Linn Audio Loudspeakers Athenaeum Speaker Review

Horns and Woodwinds

I love woodwinds. For example, I own most of Pete Fountain’s records; he played a great clarinet. I love to hear the great saxophone players of jazz. On the classical side, flutes and oboes really appeal to me. To enjoy woodwinds through your system, your speakers have to have great balance from the upper bass through the top-end. It is necessary to have more than balance. These instruments move small amounts of air but this air is a very essential part of their sound. If your system doesn’t let you hear these nuances, then the music will sound nice, but not alive.

Horns are more demanding in both frequency range and dynamics. It is often difficult to get the explosive dynamics, the bite, and the body of a trumpet right without sounding edgy, bright, or overly muted. My system with the Athenaeums is startling when a horn cuts in and at the same time never get edgy or bright. They also bring big band music to life without hurting your ears or damping out the power of the band. They have the ability to get really loud in a very effortless way that even exceeds that of my Teresonic Ingenium.

Again, it is the mid-bass instruments that give the Linns just a hint of trouble. Both the baritone and bass sax would wander a bit between the two drivers. By the time you get down to a contrabass sax, this is no problem.

Drums, Cymbals, and Percussion

As I have said before, it’s so hard to know if your system is accurate when playing drums. I will never forget one night at the Pops when, during intermission, they changed the setup on the stage for the guest who was coming. This included a new drummer and drum kit. The difference was between what we audiophiles would call slow, overdone bass with the first set and fast, tight bass with the second set. Now, I ask you, how would you know this if you weren’t there? Yet, there is something I can tell you about both drum sets and drummers. They both carried the rhythm and pace of the music. So, I think that’s what we always have to judge the ability of a system when it comes to drums. It’s easy to rob all the weight and substance from your system if you try to get every recording to have fast and tight bass, but I feel drums should always convey real rhythm and pace.

This is one area where the Linn speakers differ from my Teresonics. The Linns have a tendency to impart a small degree of sameness to drums compared to the Teresonics. Drums also don’t have the same quick slam over the Linn speakers. Still, they move so much air and thus you feel the bass so much with the Linns that the drums sound big and powerful. I have to admit that the sound of bass in general on the Linn Athenaeums is very addictive even if is a little much, though I’m not sure it is.

Maybe I’m the only one, but it has always amazed me at the Symphony when the percussionist would strike the little triangle and you could so clearly hear it above all the other instruments of the symphony. Truth is, the more easily you can hear these little percussion instruments, the more natural the music sounds. The horn of the Athenaeums do this in a wonderful way that seems to be in perfect balance. Like everything I’ve heard over these speakers, you don’t just get the sound of the percussions, you also get a wonderful sense of their harmonic structure.

Then, there are the cymbals. They can range in sound from a startling crash, to a very brassy bright sound, and a very silvery shimmer. All cymbals do not sound alike, just like drums don’t, but speakers that play cymbals right will let you hear those differences with ease and naturalness. I though these speakers played cymbals in a very natural and revealing way. Let’s end with the two most important instruments: Pianos and the Human Voice

Pianos may tell us more about our system than any other single instrument. It plays over such a large frequency range. It can be powerful or soft. It reacts sonically to how hard or easy the pianist strikes the notes. It can sustain a note or the note can be quickly released. The piano is also capable of incredible dynamics.

The ability of the piano to cover such a large frequency range is what makes shortcomings show up in a speaker’s coherency. I’m used to listening to single-driver speakers which are, by design, coherent and escape this problem. The Athenaeums play piano music beautifully. It is easy to hear the differences in pianos, the instrument can sound incredibly powerful, or delicate and beautiful. There isn’t quite the same coherency as with the Teresonics or Audio Notes; the Linns are a little less seamless then these two speakers.

The most important thing for a system to get right to me is the human voice. For me, a system must play vocals so that they sound natural, alive, and allow you the space and context of where the voice has been recorded. My Teresonic Ingenium XRs do this as well if not better than any speaker I have heard at any price.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well the Athenaeums also played female voices. There are subtle differences between the two, mostly brought on by how they play the octaves above and below the female voice. Still, female voices on the Athenaeum sound equally alive and natural as they do on the Teresonics. They may not give you quite as much of the context of the venue where the recording was made, or quite the air around and within the voice, though.

Male voices don’t fare quite as well, though. I tried everything I could including different amps, but I could always hear the horn coloring the male voices. Sometimes this was in quite musical ways, and sometimes in what I found to be less than satisfactory ways. Now let’s move on to talk about some specific LPs and how they sounded on this system.