Three years of in-house development have brought Linn’s Glasgow-built 360 loudspeaker its first proprietary drive units, built around a new motor system the company calls Pistonik and available now as a retrofit upgrade for existing owners.
The 360 already carried a significant array of distortion-reduction engineering ahead of this update, with Adaptive Bias Control, a Power DAC amplification stage and an Exakt phase-linear digital crossover all working in tandem to achieve the speaker’s signature low-distortion output across a wide dispersion pattern.
That existing architecture had, however, relied on third-party lower-frequency drivers, a dependency Linn identified as the single largest remaining source of distortion in the system and the primary motivation for developing the new units entirely from scratch.
Pistonik, the motor system at the centre of both the new six-inch upper bass and eight-inch woofer units, achieves its linearity through a long-stroke motor topology built around an extended magnet gap, with the complete motor assembly immersed in permanent magnetic saturation to stabilise the voice coil field and reduce the impact of eddy currents across the operating range.
Beyond the motor itself, a triple-layered ventilation network addresses acoustic compression as an independent distortion source, with dedicated airflow paths also drawing heat away from the voice coil and into surrounding steel and aluminium structures to maintain consistent performance across extended listening sessions.
Both drivers use hard aluminium diaphragms, a material selected for its combination of rigidity and low mass, with the diaphragm coupling geometry tuned to push mechanical resonance frequencies beyond the operating band and reduce their amplitude at the point where they do occur.
Each completed unit then receives an individual Exakt correction profile generated from factory laser measurements, with the 360’s onboard processing applying a tailor-made filter accurate to within 0.0625dB of the reference curve once the driver is installed.
Image Credit (Linn)
The new drive units are standard across all newly built 360 systems from today, with the retrofit upgrade for existing owners priced at £16,500 and completed at the customer’s home in under two hours. Otherwise, the full 360 Exakt Integrated Loudspeakers are priced at £99,500, and the 360 Passive with Active Bass configuration carries a £67,000 price.
Those interested in hearing the updated 360 in person can book a demonstration through Linn’s website, with the company offering direct access to authorised dealers across the UK for a hands-on listen ahead of any purchase decision.
Linn has also introduced a walnut veneer finish for the 360 alongside the driver upgrade, joining the existing Classic Collection with a choice of anodised black or silver aluminium trim to accompany the natural wood grain.
The post Linn’s flagship 360 loudspeaker gets a Pistonik upgrade appeared first on Trusted Reviews.