This piece was originally published in Stereophile in 1998:
One of the big industry stories of 1985 was the split, both personal and commercial, between the British Linn and Naim companies. Led by Ivor Tiefenbrun and Julian Vereker (footnote 1) respectively, both companies had started up in the early 1970s. Both men held similar views, both about the fat-cat complacency of British designers (which had led to a grievous sound-quality slump in the mid '70s), and about the system rethinking necessary for what some writers, unaware of the rigors of thought required by followers of that spiritual descendant of Fowler, William Safire, would term a "quantum leap" forward in sound reproduction (footnote 2).
With that essential journalistic attribute, 20:20 hindsight, it is now obvious that when Julian and Ivor joined forces, they would indeed shotgun first the UK and then the rest of the world—even the US—into a brave new world of turntable-quality-above-all system matching
