Luxman L-430

Pre-Alpine days, but successful ones.

The L-430 series and its 1981 L-550 elder and original sold extremely well worldwide : the are thousands and thousands and thousands of them still around, making music.

Still very healthy gear and looks-wise obviously a mix between the L-550 (1981) series and the slimline L-5 lineup (1979).

Duo-ß circuit with the then new plus-X power-supply regulation, a 300VA transformer, two 15,000µF caps, large sharkfin heatsink and a quadruple push-pull of high fT bipolars all inherited from the L-510 make the power part.

The preamp part has LUX's wide-ranging but soft (and useful) NF tone controls with 5 frequency turnovers ; the tone circuit is placed within an NFb loop of the power-amp section.

Single Stage amplification means there is no flat amp : high Gm low-noise FETs in the parallel push-pull 1st stage provide the necessary gain to do away with the second stage. The single differential input format directly feeds the driver/output section.

Bypass and phono straight modes circumvent the tone and various selectors for an even straighter route to music.
When DAD was a mere AUX, phono stages were still rich so the L-430 can cater for 300 or 100 Ohm MC cartridges.


The L-430 was from the "Status Series" in some parts of the world, from the "Revolver Series" in Japan, the "Laboratory Standard Series" in Germany and probably something else elsewhere - Luxman is Luxman is Luxman. A "Revolver" key-holder/chain with leather pad was made available in Japan.

Alpine was not there yet. This happened in late 1983 so the L-430, like the L-550 series, first had a YOSII T-Tag, carried over to Alpine T-Tag for the later production runs.

Many smaller variants were made until 1984 : first with even numbers (L-400, L-200, L-210, L-220, L-230 etc), then with odd numbers (L205, L-215, L-225, L-235 etc) until the rare but beautiful L-435 and L-405 in 1985.
But for the latter, all of these sold like hotcakes.



A late release L-430 UK announcement at Gramophone.net.