Famed analogue audio component manufacturer Linn has embraced the digital audio revolution. Stephen Dawson looks at the Kiko network audio system to see if the company has kept up.

The UK hi-fi firm Linn made its name back in the 1970s as a major participant in the push that led to the importance of the turntable being recognised. Until then it had been somewhat dismissed, with most of the focus on loudspeakers when it comes to quality sound. But Linn rightly pointed out that without a decent signal to begin with, a speaker couldn’t sound good.

And Linn had its much heralded Sondek turntable available to provide just such a high quality signal.

Since then digital has come to dominate the audio world, and Linn has not been left behind. In addition to its traditional analogue products, it offers a range of digital streaming devices. One such is the unit here under consideration, the Linn Kiko system.

WHAT IS IT?
This is a four piece system consisting of two smallish loudspeakers, a remote control and a central control box with built-in amplifiers. Two speakers, but four amplifiers. The tweeter and the bass driver in each loudspeaker are separately amped, with the crossover handled actively by the main unit’s electronics.

So what does all this do? The purpose of speakers and amplifiers are clear enough, as is the remote control (it has input selectors, volume controls and such).

The functioning of the central unit was not immediately clear, however. Oh, some things were obvious. It has three HDMI inputs and one HDMI output, for example. You can also feed audio to it via digital optical and coaxial audio inputs, plus analogue stereo on the rear panel using standard RCA sockets, and analogue stereo on the front using a 3.5mm socket (useful for ad hoc plugging in of MP3 players).

The rest was, for a while, a bit of a puzzle, though, for a rather unfortunate combination of reasons: considerable complexity, unclear instructions and an apparent misapprehension by Linn that the unit is easy to understand.

SETTING UP

Being a know-it-all, I of course quickly ran into problems. I plugged everything in and switched on the system, and nothing much happened. I pressed a few buttons for inputs and managed to get a Blu-ray player playing and producing sound, with its image being cast up on the TV screen. But I couldn’t get any on-screen menus up for setting up the unit.

This, it turns out, was a futile exercise anyway since the unit has no on-screen menus (it passes through HDMI video without any processing). Being unsuccessful, I checked the box for the manual, but could only find the safety instructions. This, it turns out, was also a futile exercise, since the unit has no manual.

But the linn.co.uk/go/kiko website was prominently printed on the unit’s carton so I went there. This site made it clear that the first step was to download and install a setup wizard. This I did (about 80MB in total, including the latest version of the Microsoft .NET framework) and I ran it. Now remember, this wizard runs on your computer (there are Windows and Mac versions), not on the unit. It guides you step by step through the process and at various points communicates with the unit over your network.

It tells you how to stick the rubber feet on the unit, insert the batteries into the remote, plug in the speakers (using hefty cables terminated in professional audio style Neutrik Speakon connectors) and plug in the power.

Then it tells you to switch on the unit and, after a moment, hold down the hash key to produce an audio test signal. This didn’t work. Eventually I worked out that the system must have assumed I’d gone past that step because it also had the HDMI and network connections in place. I switched off, unplugged all of those, and switched back on and then the audio test worked. That’s the kind of thing that can shake the confidence of a novice, and of an experienced reviewer.

Then you switch it off, plug in the network cable, switch it back on and click through to the next wizard page, which shows a list of found devices: the Kiko DSM was shown. A couple of steps later the wizard announced that a new firmware was available and offered to upgrade it. I let it have its way and a few minutes later the Kiko was upgraded.

The wizard guides you through the rest of the connections, and lets you name the unit’s location (you can have multiple units on the same network). At one point it also notes that you can place the unit on its end if you prefer, rather than down flat. The small front-panel display actually re-orientates itself when the unit is so placed.

COMPLEXITY
It was after that when things got complicated. So here’s what I was able to work out after many hours of fiddling with it. You can stream music to the unit via Apple Airplay or via DLNA. You can also stream all audio content to the unit from certain computers, in the sense that any audio that is generated by the computer – whether from music playing apps or any other source – is intercepted and sent to the Kiko to play. You also play internet radio stations and control the unit from an iOS or Android device.

To do all that successfully you will discover piece by piece the software that you will need to download. Except for Airplay. If the unit is talking to your network properly (remember, its connection is wired: WiFi is not included), then the unit ought to show up (as it did for me) on the drop down list of playing speakers you can used in the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad music app. It is important that you install the ‘Kinsky’ control app to your iOS device. Remember, there is no OSD and the front panel display is too small to provide any useful information, so for things like accessing music via DLNA from your network you need this interface.

You will also need it to choose internet radio stations from the basic list provided. Fortunately you can choose new ones from the station provider’s website. Unfortunately you will need to find and download from the Linn website a program called Konfig to tell your Kiko the user name you are using on that website so that it can communicate and load up your specified stations. (Finding out how to do that was difficult since Linn’s website, which is supposed to serve in lieu of a manual, had a link on how to do internet radio which led nowhere useful.

To stream from your computer you need to download Linn software for your computer. This is called Songcast and is available for Mac or Windows. I tested the latter. It would not install on XP, and probably not Vista (it says that it requires Windows 7). It installed on a new Toshiba Windows 8 machine, but wouldn’t work and both the Kiko and the software kept getting into some kind of tail-chasing loop so that the software was connecting and disconnecting rapidly, the indicator on screen flickering as it did so, while the Kiko was physically (you could hear a relay clicking inside) switching mode just about every second.

Rebooting the computer and switching off the Kiko was required to stop this, but a new attempt at forming a connection led to no sound, alongside the same behaviour. I was using the latest version (4.3.3) of Songcast. In the end I found an older Windows 7 notebook, and with this it seemed to work nicely.

SOUND
All that was somewhat of a pity because when I did stream music to the unit, it sounded very nice – apart from one significant deficiency. The unit supports streamed FLAC, WAV, Apple Lossless, MP3, WMA (except lossless), AIFF, AAC and OGG, where appropriate with a resolution audio of up to 24 bit 192kHz. Given Linn’s stereo roots, it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that the upper bass, mid-frequencies and treble was beautiful, with a clean and highly dynamic delivery. The detail was excellent, as was the stereo imaging.

The use of separate feeds of up to 33W each to the tweeter and bass/midrange in each of the speakers may have been an aid to this performance.

But the bass – deep bass, of course, but also the mid bass – was definitely disappointing. There was some hint of it in the upper bass, which certainly provided enough of the rhythmic content to ensure first class musicality. But without the underpinning of significant deeper bass, the sound was ultimately light weight.

This is important because whatever the sound of this system is, you’re stuck with it. There is no subwoofer output, so really no chance to improve this aspect of performance.

CONCLUSION
There are some other omissions, too. No USB for example means that you can’t play directly from mass storage. And at this price the lack of WiFi seems surprising.

Still, if you aren’t that interested in bass, would like an otherwise very nice sounding system for streaming music, and perhaps plugging in a few other sources, and are confident that your retailer will give you plenty of support during the installation, then the Linn Kiko could well be what you’re after.