Linn Bedrok LP12 Plinth Upgrade

@dover 

diamond hardening refers to a heating and cooling process used to harden the steel, it is not a coating. The Dohmann uses maraging steel - which is really an alloy, likely including elements of copper and nickel that results in a harder steel than ferrous metals, more stable

I just looked at Dohmann Audio's website and for the Helix One Mk3 they claim:

• Diamond Like Coating Amorphous Material Bearing Friction Modifier (DLC)

To me this looks like the real thing, especially the low friction effect.  Of course, the coating may be applied to a hard steel shaft.  Many claim to use 'tool steel' but maraging steels are also hard.  They are characterised by very low carbon contents but typically are around 15% nickel.

Once upon a time I was a metallurgist, and I do apologise for the naming confusions we promulgate.  All steels are actually alloys (mixtures), but the term 'alloy steel' is used where carbon is not the main alloying element.  Ferrous metals are alloys where the main element is iron, which is true of all steels.

Hardness in these contexts is measured by pressing a diamond into the metal, and measuring the size of the indentation.  Rockwell C uses a conical diamond, whereas the Vickers hardness test uses a pyramid shape.  Diamond is harder than any metal, hence my inquiry into what 'diamond hardened' really means.

Just as an aside, I worked at a Vickers subsidiary which was at that time the most modern alloy steel plant in Europe.  We made hundreds of grades, and the final test was using an angle grinder to throw off sparks which could be compared against hundreds of samples.  The length, shape and colour of the fireworks reflected the underlying composition of the alloy.

Talking of sparks, after working close to three-phase, 110-ton electric arc furnaces with 2-foot diameter electrodes shorting onto cold scrap, I amazed I can still hear.  120-dbA.  Mind you, the furnaces were drowned out when rail cars, two at a time, full of scrap, were tippled so the scrap fell down a huge chute into an even bigger bucket.  Lots of uncontrolled resonances!

@daveyf

"I suspect these very same folk would have little problem with the same looking Bedrok if it was priced at three times the current ask. Question is what price is it that elicits push back??"

I can’t imagine Linn would have sold many Bedroks at $33,000 each. That would have made the upgrade as expensive their top turntable new with arm, cartridge and phono stage. Remember very few Klimax LP12 owners paid that much in the first place - the vast majority have upgraded in steps over many years or decades. Some like me bought second hand.

Gilad has said that they design products to sound as best they can make them. Then they set the price to make their required profit margin. It isn’t in their interests to set prices any higher as they’d sell less product.

Having said that, I think they may have been tempted to go for a higher than normal margin with the Bedrok because they can only produce them in low volumes anyway - a kind of rationing by price. I am guessing here, but it does fit.

It is a very expensive turntable upgrade in comparison to Linn's other offerings.

$11,000 rules me out, but who knows I might have been interested at half that price.

@newton_john Part of the price that Linn asks for the Bedrok has to do with the fact that they outsource the manufacturing of this plinth.

Another thing I believe is that in some ways Linn painted themselves into a corner with the price of the 50th anniversary model. They could not price the new Bedrok plinth at a small fraction of that model, as the Bedrok plinth was the main upgrade to the LP12 50th Anniversary.

@newton_john 

I also had a great uncle who’d been some sort of technician/instrument maker at Cambridge and had worked with some of the great men who’d done much of the Physics that I was learning about

Those laboratory technicians were vastly underrated in my opinion.  They had to somehow make, from glass, wood and whatever else came to hand, the vacuum systems and apparatus that led to the discovery of subatomic particles, starting with the electron.  Without them JJ Thompson would never has got his Nobel prize.

Their successors staff the large hadron collider at CERN, which cost about $5 billion to build and roughly that much a year to operate.  Without CERN, we would not have the world-wide web or proof of the Higgs boson.

At least one US science commentator dates the decline of US science to the cancellation of funding for an equivalent at Fermilab.

@daveyf 

The price of the Bedrok is small fraction of the extra cost of the LP12-50 above the regular Klimax. I don’t see why the price of one should restrict Linn on the other. One is one off unique special design and the other is a standard upgrade for all LP12s. The former was a limited run of a couple of hundred, but the potential sales of the latter could have been huge if it weren’t for the high price.

It may well be that it would have been more expensive for Linn to do the machining of the Bedrok in their own factory. I understand that it is a messy process. They’ve always outsourced loudspeaker cabinet building. The reason they cancelled the Komri was that there was a minimum number of cabinets for reordering that made it uneconomic to continue beyond the initial run. It seems they have opposite problem with Bedrok - being only able to produce them in limited numbers.