Hi @MrDom ,
Will you be using it as an external DAC as well?
M
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Hi
Initially no, the main reason for this purchase is to play my catalogue of CDs that I have built over the last ten years.
I have a great collection of well recorded and mastered Red Book titles (imo) together with a growing collection of SACD titles.
So, I’m interested to see/hear how the Luxman will perform.
I have also recently bought several MQA CD titles from label 2L so I am intrigued as to how they will sound on the Luxman.
However, going forward I will put my Burmester 151 streamer back into the rack and use its COAXIAL output into the Luxman.
Hopefully this will turn out to be the best of both worlds. Let’s see 
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I expect so. I use my Luxman CD Player purely as a DAC except when a stack of CDs arrives and I might spin one while ripping the others.
I very much want to see what happens when Luxman release the matching preamp and streamer transport that my dealer has said has been in the wings for nearly 2 years.
22.4kg for a CD player. Impressive. That’s even heavier than the Naim NAP 250DR.
I’ve checked the inside of the player. As expected, it’s not only built like a tank but packed to the brim.
Enjoy~
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Any news from the dealer on a new DAC from Luxman? The DA-06 has been around for many years.
He seems to think their main objective is to use the CD players as DACs. The transports are all fairly self contained machines in their own case within a case. So you are basically buying a DAC with an added transport. For the high end stuff, he expects this to remain true for the foreseeable future. Many buyers of their CD players do so purely to use them as DACs. After all they are packed with all the processing needed for audio formats far beyond 16/44 LPCM and SACD.
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I find it interesting that none of these “boutique” HiFi manufactures in Japan make a streamer. Naim is well into their second generation of digital streaming products and companies like Luxman, Accuphase and even Yamaha have a multiple CD/SACD players in their catalog, but no streamers (ok Yamaha has a few cheap options and Sony only has one music streamer priced under $2000.00.)
It’s obvious all these companies (big and small) have the technical capacity to build elegant high fidelity products, but they don’t pay much attention to this category. Has streaming not caught on in Japan? I can only assume optical/laser media dominates this market. I find this curious.
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Ummm Esoteric make a streamer (two actually). TEAC make about three. Not strictly a streamer but Melco is Japanese (Mistubishi Electric Co.) Denon do an entry level one.
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Ok, fair enough… there are some streamers. But it’s clear that optical/laser products still dominate the catalog of these companies. Do audiophiles in Japan prefer CDs?
I think Naim still makes one CD player, but i’d have to check.
PS: Congrats on the Luxman player. I hope it sounds great.
I should add that in the case of Luxman, their preference for streaming has been to use Luxman software player (sadly needs a monitor and keyboard) and Bulk Pet USB to a Luxman DAC. I did compare regular ASIO USB from the same host over same cable and port with Bulk Pet USB and it was indeed miles better.
As to the other, yes. CD is still sort of king here. There are even articles about it in English if you Google it. A couple factors:
- The age of people with disposable income in a country where wages have stagnated is heavily in favour of over 40s with large CD collections.
- Streaming was very late to the party. iTunes download store was years (maybe as much as a decade) behind the rest of the world. Largely because JASRAC imposes archaic laws around digital content distribution. It made it very hard to legally stream anything for years.
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That would explain dominance of optical/laser players in Japan. Thanks for the info.
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Good question - Streaming hasn’t caught on in Japan as much as it has elsewhere. The Japanese love physical formats – it is they who have kept SACD going after more than two decades’ worth of apathy here in the West. Just before the pandemic, physical media still accounted for 70% of all music sales. Interestingly, as music steaming sales grow in popularity in Japan, CDs hang on in there suggesting that people like to buy a physical copy as well as stream.
I think @feeling_zen would know better than me but the collector instinct is strong in Japanese culture. Japan also tends to embrace new formats before anyone else and persists with them long after everyone else has moved on (Laserdisc being a good example).
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As always, a very cool looking bit of kit. I think Luxman really do design the most handsome hi-fi components in the world.
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Now you’ve got me wondering where I left my Laserdisc collection. Some of those special editions I had never made it to DVD or BR.
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I donated my Laser Disc collection to Goodwill in the late 1990’s. Then I had a DVD collection, which I donated. My Blu Rays sit in a cabinet waiting to be donated.
800+ DVDs in storage all ripped to MKV.
Ditto 300 BR.
I consider them my cold backup. And they all looked, properly ripped, far better and sound better than anything I can stream over the net.
I still have a sizeable collection of DVDs, perhaps in the range of 300+. I once pondered on the ways I could dispose of DVDs that were stored in several big boxes. The few responses here might have given me a clue. 480p content on a a large screen TV don’t work anymore these days and I’m not sure if people still watch DVDs in this day and age.
The last time I asked, there were suggestions to use CDs as an accessory for decoration or as saucer for tea cups. Not very elegant proposals I am afraid.
Depends. Streamed back on an Amazon/Roku/AppleTV box, those 480p discs will be nearly unwatchable. Streamed or played back on a high end BR player like a Revon or Pioneer and they will look so smooth. I had a top end Denon BR a while back. It did not do 4K but did both disc and local UPnP streaming. I can assure you that the difference in quality between a DVD and a 1080p BR on that machine was smaller than the difference between the same machines 1080p output and 4K on my Amazon box. I used that machine on an 80" screen for a while and assure you DVDs looked good.
Via my cheap Sony disc player or Amazon box, DVDs or their rips look ropey as hell on a little 32" TV.
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Thanks for the information and clarification. I was using cheap budget DVD players all this while. Playing DVDs on these cheap players through to the big screen TV, the picture quality is not good. Size of display is 50" and 55". It’s watchable, but in comparison to 1080p content the 480p looked washed out with blurry lines.