Luxman KD-117

Luxman's only D.A.T. recorder, meant to go with the equally rare digital/analogue LV-109 integrated and LE-109 phono preamp, all three being part of the "black plague" era.

Apart from 5 windings for the different sections, the KD-117 had a fairly unusual feature in the shape of a low-pass filter switch for the dedicated CD input, with fine calibration level pots for the said input !

But given the fact that all CD players already have LPF by nature and the impossibility to record at 44.1Khz on the KD-117 (whether in digital or analogue), this seems like a fairly dubious function...
The analogue CD inputs are in fact followed by analogue CD outputs, allowing to loop the CD player through the KD-117 and benefit from the (...supplementary) LPF.

The KD-117 had optical digital i/o's along the better coax' and, if it didn't know about SCMS, it still couldn't make a 1st gen' digital>digital dub if a "copy prohibit" flag was present on the original tape.

Last but not least... Sony did OEM the mechanism for Alpine !
So the drive and drum assy' in the KD-117 are the same as in Sony's own DTC-1000ES, just like they are in Pioneer's contemporary D-1000.

Very strange to see Alpine providing DAT drives to Nakamichi and Teac... but not to its own fully-owned subsidiary - Luxman always is Luxman, even when owned by anybody else !


Better images and full specifications coming soon from x-rare 1987 japanese catalogs.

A bit about the KD-117's meters accuracy, here.