Luxman D-107u

Super-tweaked version of the bestselling D-105u CD player - super-tweaked version of a rather banal-player-with-a-twist.

The twist being, naturally, the two 6CG7 tubes glowing through the front. Also the generous amount of copper foils placed over the digital-to-analogue chips, ICs, caps, power transformers and output transformers.
Yes : the D-107u uses output transformers instead of analogue low pass filtering !

I believe the digital-to-analogue conversion to be done by two Burr Brown PCM series ; it is 18bit / 8fs at any rate. Besides the market-dependent presence of wooden sideburns, these are the very good points.

The bad points are... a build-quality which is obviously on the low end with dispersed cabling back and forth and back and forth and a lot of plastic, too.
Whether in Japan or elsewhere, the marketing teams didn't deem useful to show the guts of the D-107u ; depending on one's own standards, it could even have been counterproductive...

Worse yet, the pickup is a Sony KSS-152A - nowadays unavailable.
Another bad point is that, given the effort spent on the audio part, Luxman didn't think necessary to offer a digital output either... even if the earlier D-105u did have one !

In other words, Luxman could have taken advantage of a series that sold very well to make a real topper with visible high-end build quality - but didn't. Sound-wise a fair player but no more - the build quality prevented the D-107u to play in the league it was destined to.

Design-wise, the entire series (LV-105, LV-105u, LV-107u, D-103, D-103u, DZ-03, D-105, D-105u) is somewhat directly inspired by Luxman's original prototype for its first X-1D CD player and the x-rare D-03 ; the later DZ-03 being the closest versions of that.
Alas, this was done in a much less inspired manner.

The D-107u came too late in the series and was too incoherent on its own. But the idea of a mix between solid-state and tube circuitry successfully flourished elsewhere - thanks to Luxman.


Detailed views of the 107u can be seen at thevintagecorner ; a service manual for it should be downloadable somewhere here.