Ivor Tiefenbrun
| Ivor Sigmund Tiefenbrun | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 1946 Glasgow, Scotland |
| Occupation | Engineer, businessman |
Ivor Sigmund Tiefenbrun MBE (born March 1946) is the founder and Chairman of Linn Products Ltd, Glasgow, Scotland-based manufacturers of high fidelity audio equipment and home theatre equipment. He was influential in the manufacture and retail of British audio in the 1970s and 1980s, and was appointed MBE by Elizabeth II in 1992.
Tiefenbrun was born in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland, the oldest of three children, to Jan (also known as Jack) Tiefenbrun, who was born in Kraków and arrived in Glasgow as a refugee from Austria in 1939.
Tiefenbrun dropped out of a Mechanical Engineering degree from Glasgow's Strathclyde University, and developed his engineering and business skills in his late father's company, Castle Precision Engineering, now run by his younger brother Marcus.
Linn Products Limited was started by Tiefenbrun in the city's Castlemilk district near Linn Park in 1972 to manufacture a hi-fi turntable, developed from his personal interest in music reproduction, based on contemporary models. His approach was to try getting more information off the long-play gramophone record (otherwise known as the LP), and making the turntable immune to audio feedback – he successfully discovered a marketing story very different from the prevalent view in the hi-fi industry at that time. The end product was the Linn Sondek LP12, which remained an industry benchmark for at least three decades.
In the early years, Tiefenbrun hawked the turntable around shops in a crusade against the received wisdom that all turntables sounded the same. Tiefenbrun also battled the thinking, since Edgar Villchur, that the loudspeakers were the most important, instead asserting primacy of "the front end", saying that the quality of sound of the source was key – once information was lost, distorted or corrupted, was gone forever and could never be corrected; that garbage in equalled garbage out. Those few dealers who wanted to listen to it did, and heard a difference. By the end of the 1970s, his views had gained significant ground, large numbers of dealers and audiophiles had by then accepted this as the norm in the United Kingdom and around the world.
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