11 Facts About Ivor Tiefenbrun

Ivor Sigmund Tiefenbrun MBE was born on March 1946 and is the founder and chairman of Linn Products Ltd, Glasgow-based manufacturers of high-fidelity audio equipment and home theatre equipment.

Ivor Tiefenbrun was influential in the manufacture and retail of British audio in the 1970s and 1980s, and was appointed MBE by Elizabeth II in 1992.

Ivor Tiefenbrun dropped out of a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and developed his engineering and business skills in his late father's company, Castle Precision Engineering, now run by his nephew.

Ivor Tiefenbrun's approach was to strive to extract much more information from the long-play gramophone record, and to make the turntable immune to audio feedback.

Ivor Tiefenbrun thought that precision engineering of the turntable would prove to be far more important than many other designers believed The end product was the Linn Sondek LP12 which remains in production after nearly five decades.

Ivor Tiefenbrun argued against industry notables like Edgar Villchur, who felt that loudspeakers were the most important aspect of the audio playback chain, instead asserting the primacy of "the front end".

Ivor Tiefenbrun said that once information was lost, distorted or corrupted, it was gone forever and could never be retrieved.

Ivor Tiefenbrun is outspoken, irreverent, highly opinionated, a brilliant and original thinker, and one of the most fascinating conversationalists either of us has met.

Tiefenbrun had been suffering from a serious illness, and in May 2006, it was announced that Ivor Tiefenbrun had stepped aside as Linn's managing director, but would assume the role of Executive chairman.

Ivor Tiefenbrun revealed that he was suffering from Crohn's colitis, a debilitating autoimmune bowel disorder.

Ivor Tiefenbrun withdrew upon the uproar after it was reported in The Scotsman that he had said "you would have to be thick to accept that [Margaret Thatcher] was evil force" in Scotland.