September 20 - The venerable Japanese high-end audio manufacturer Luxman is re-launching the brand in the U.S. Although Luxman components have been in continuous production since the company’s founding in 1925, the brand has been absent from the U.S. market for the past 20 years.

High-end distributor On a Higher Note, founded by Philip O’Hanlon, is handling the re-launch, and will represent the brand in the U.S. Luxman has changed owners a number of times since 1984, when it was bought by Alps, who re-badged Alpine products with the Luxman name and sold the same products through two different distribution channels.

Luxman was acquired by Samsung in 1995, but had limited success with the brand outside the Far East. In 2000, the son-in-law of the Pioneer Electronics heiress decided to restore Luxman to its former glory and bring to market some of the high-end designs that had been in development but never released.

Significantly, Luxman was the only major Japanese manufacturer producing tubed amplifiers through the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. market will see the full spectrum of Luxman’s latest products, ranging from a $3000 tubed integrated amplifier to the $48,000 80Th Anniversary Commemoration Model monoblocks, which were in development for more than 13 years.

The line begins with the SQ-N100, an EL84-based integrated amplifier that outputs 12Wpc. The unit is designed for small spaces, as suggested by its modest output power and small form factor (the unit is just 12″ wide and 8.5″ deep).

The SQ-N100 features tone controls, a line-straight switch, and a phonostage. A matching solid-state, upsampling CD player (D-N100) sells for $2000. The entry-level solid-state integrated is the L-505U ($3500, see photo, top left) with 100Wpc of output power, mm and mc phonostage, one balanced input, and a remote control.

The frontpanel output-level meters are backlit in blue. Other features include tone controls, a line-straight switch, a loudness-compensation switch, and a subsonic filter. Rear-panel jacks, connected by short RCA jumpers, separate the L-505U’s preamp and power amp sections for upgrading, or for inserting a signal-processing device.

The next step up is the L-550A Mk.II ($4500) with pure Class A operation. The L-550A outputs 20Wpc into 8 ohms and 40Wpc into 4 ohms. The front-panel output-level meters are backlit in yellow. The unit is also supplied with an aluminum remote control and offers two balanced inputs, each with its own phaseinvert switch.

The penultimate integrated amplifier is the L-590A Mk.II, which features all of Luxman’s reference-grade circuits and build techniques. The $9000 unit outputs 30Wpc of Class A power into 8 ohms (60Wpc into 4).

Although the L-590A Mk.II seems to offer only a modest increase in (more…)

(Excepted and adapted from Introductory Guide to High-Performance Audio Systems by Robert Harley © 2007 by Robert Harley. To order, call 800 888-4741 or visit hifibooks.com.)

August 21 - Your first decision in choosing loudspeakers is whether your system will reproduce 2-channel music, multichannel music, film soundtracks as part of a home-theater system, or all of these. No matter what loudspeaker configuration you choose, the three starting criteria for making your short list of candidates will be the same. Let’s look at those criteria:

1) Size, Appearance, and Integration in the Home
After you’ve designated a place for your loudspeakers, determine the optimum loudspeaker size for your room—the urban apartment dweller will likely have tighter size constraints than the suburban audiophile.

Some listeners will want the loudspeakers to discreetly blend into the room; others will make the hi-fi system the room’s center of activity and won’t mind large, imposing loudspeakers. When choosing a place for your loudspeakers, keep in mind that their placement is a crucial factor in how your system will sound. Read the Full Story Here

August 16 - A new generation of operational amplifiers (op-amps) and power-amplifier drivers from National Semiconductor might result in a wholesale improvement in sound quality across a wide range of audio products.

Op-amps are everywhere: preamplifier linestages, CD players, digital-to-analog converters, and the front ends of power amplifiers, to name just a few product categories. Any component with analog input or output jacks probably employs several op-amps.

Many high-end product designers face the decision of whether to use op-amps in their products or to realize the circuit with discrete transistors and associated parts (resistors and capacitors). Op-amps are much smaller, cheaper, and easier to implement than discrete circuits.

An op-amp a fraction the size of a postage stamp can replace a dozen or more discrete components that would consume several square inches of circuit-board real estate. Historically, op-amps have not matched the sound quality of a well-designed discrete circuit (tube or transistor).

The highest-end products use discrete circuits exclusively; a few designers would never even consider using an op-amp. That’s largely because the op-amps available today are designed for mass-market applications where low cost is the primary consideration.

But National Semiconductor, a giant in the integrated-circuit industry (revenues of nearly $2 billion), has begun shipping a new family of premium op-amps that were designed from the ground up for optimum sonic performance.

National’s goal from the outset was to develop an entirely new breed of op-amp whose technical and sonic performance met or exceeded that of a discrete circuit. The result is the LME49xxx series of devices, which sports noise, distortion, and bandwidth specifications that are unprecedented in a monolithic (integrated circuit) audio amplifier.

For example, THD+N (total harmonic distortion plus noise) is specified at just 0.00003%, and the gain bandwidth is 55MHz.

As we all know, great specs don’t guarantee great sound quality. Surprisingly, National Semiconductor also realized this and built a dedicated listening room to evaluate the sound quality of its new performance-audio products. The listening room features a fully floating floor and complete treatment with diffusers and bass absorbers.

The electronics are custom designed, and the monoblock power amplifiers drive Wilson WATT/Puppy 7 loudspeakers. It’s unusual, to say the least, for an integrated-circuit manufacturer to perform listening evaluations on its products.

The company simultaneously announced the LME49810, a 200V IC that replaces the discrete driver stage in a power amplifier. A power amplifier’s driver stage takes in a line-level signal and amplifies it to drive the amplifier’s output transistors. The LME49810 replaces the approximately 25 components of a discrete driver stage.

The LME49xxx series of op-amps is aimed at higher-end audio-video receivers (those starting at about $3k at retail), high-end preamps, CD players, digital-to-analog converters, and power amplifiers. The devices are also starting to be used in professional products (a recording console uses hundreds of op-amps).

National Semiconductor wouldn’t specify which high-end manufacturers will be using these new op-amps, but suggested that the list reads like a Who’s Who in high-end audio. (An illustration in National Semiconductor’s literature shows a Mark Levinson product.)

The company reports that high-end designers who have tried the new op-amps are extremely enthusiastic about the new devices’ sound quality. If these new op-amps are indeed a breakthrough, listeners might enjoy a significant step up in sound quality in a variety of products.

July 16 - “It’s like a photocopy machine for sound.”

A new technology being tested at the Library of Congress makes it possible to extract audio signals from record grooves without playing them with a stylus.

The system photographs the grooves and a computer converts the images of groove modulation into audio signals. The process can even “play� records that have been broken and put back together, all without a skip or tick. The computer ignores groove features that are obviously scratches or dirt, which are heard as ticks and pops.

The technology was invented by Carl Haber, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. He calls the system IRENE, after the first recording he and collaborator Vitaliy Fadeyev digitized, “Goodnight Irene� by The Weavers.

The Library of Congress is investigating whether IRENE should be used to transcribe the Library’s vast collection of recordings, much of it on old and obsolete disc formats. IRENE has much potential because it doesn’t require playing the record with a stylus, which could potentially degrade the recording.

You can read the story - and listen to test tracks - reported by National Public Radio here.