We have tested over 60 different digital front ends from
$50K and down. Three manufactures stood out for sounding toe tapping musical
and not sounding digital. Total dac with the Total dac server and a very
expensive AES cable in-between the 2 pieces to get them to communicate with
each other. Total dac was very nice but cost after shipping, exchange and duty
is $17000 for one of the less expensive Total Dac and server set ups.
I own an audio distribution company in Canada and occasionally people come over
to hear my set up. I personally now run a Lumin A1 and a D1 server with their
built in dacs. I set up the A1 for people at the $6000-$7000 range and the D1
for people under $3000.00. First of all I want to say that after 6 months of
use, the Lumin product has worked flawless. I even accidentally unplugged my power
on the server and it was back up and playing in less than one minute later. The
Lumin app is spectacular, no tech support needed. The Lumin in my opinion, is
the most simple server to set up that I have experienced.
Now let's talk sound; When you test as much digital as we have, you come the
conclusion that dacs that are super expensive are really about system matching. Same
goes for digital cables. We tested the Lumin A1 and D1 using their own dacs and
then added several outboard reference dacs to the 2 servers to hear the
difference. Our conclusion was, there was no outboard dacs that were better in
our reference system than the Lumin own dacs at their respected price point. Truth
be told I have heard dacs costing 2-3 times more that were not in the same
league as Lumin's own dacs. We believe that one reason for this conclusion was
because when you add the outboard dac, you are adding jitter and a digital
cable in the scenario. We also added a reclocker and this helped but the Lumin was still better just doing it's own thing. Where you can make huge gains with the Lumin product is
adding a product like Core Power technology balanced power cord on the power
supply. I went from liking the Lumin, to being shocked at how good this all in
one unit could sound. Is my A1 with CPT cord as good as my previous Total dac
set up; slightly different flavors but with my reference system, they are darn
close.
With all good things there is bad and the Lumin is no different. The Lumin is
not a stand a loan dac and you cannot plug any other devices into it. You must upgrade the stock
power cable. It must be directly plugged into your router. They need a
real 250 hours of play to open up but 500 hours is better. The D1 unit needs
some sort of isolation but the A1 is already isolated properly.
If you can get past these things than this is a world class digital device at
an incredible price. Is it a TT, no but we are getting very close. I would also
say that anyone that is looking at a $3000-$4000 dac, should really look at the
D1 and add a CPT cord with some isolating cones.
For the record, I just plug my hard drive and USB stick directly into my Lumins but they do sell a matching NAS set up, that works off the same Lumin app.
Cheers,