Lumin's spare setup at AXPONA was one of our favorite rooms at the show.
Meet Nelson Choi and Angus Leung of Lumin in our AXPONA video.
One of our favorite rooms at AXPONA this year was Lumin's spare setup on the 15th floor. The new X2 streaming DAC with external PSU directly drove the massive and massively underrated Lumin Amp (look out for an in-depth write-up on this Class-AB, 42 lb. powerhouse, coming soon). The other component you see in the photo is the Lumin L2 music server and switch, another underrated Lumin product that seamlessly streams music to Lumin products without any tinkering with UPnP server installations.
The switch portion of the L2 allows it to sit near your system and offer clean network connectivity via two Ethernet or two SFP optical fiber ports. Lumin used to offer versions with drives installed, but SSD prices have become so volatile that the L2 ships without drives. Mark Gurvey, the US Lumin distributor, assured us repeatedly that the installation procedure is really easy.
In our video, we catch up with Lumin's Nelson Choi, co-founder, and Angus Leung, global sales and marketing manager. Along with Li On, product development manager, our favorite hi-fi trio came in from Hong Kong, where Lumin is based. Watch the video to learn about the components discussed here and to see an all-new product from Lumin!
An FPGA Aside
The Lumin X2 is a leap up from the X1, as it uses a fully custom FPGA DAC rather than the dual ESS SABRE chips of the X1. Coding a DAC chip from scratch is a huge undertaking that gives a company the ability to build its sound into every aspect of the product. However, we don't want you to come away thinking that using an off-the-shelf chip is an easy way out. We could hand you a 1ZZ-FE Toyota engine, but that doesn't mean it's easy to build a Lotus Elise around it.
Whether you have a custom-coded FPGA or a chip from ESS, AKM, or Burr-Brown (Texas Instruments) at the heart of your DAC, there are so many surrounding choices, all of which affect the sound and performance:
- Tuning of the off-the-shelf chip
- Chip configuration, such as dual mono or multiple chips per channel
- Clocking architecture and clock quality
- Input stage design and jitter handling
- Method of converting the chip's current output to voltage for the analog stage
- Output buffer and filter design
- Power supply quality and sophistication
- PCB layout and chassis design
Imagine adding complete coding flexibility to this sea of variables. Creating a great FPGA DAC can only realistically be done by people who've spent a long time understanding the sound of every off-chip component. But even for the master designers at Lumin, the X2 was years in the making. “We went through many iterations, over and over again,” says Li On, product development manager. “The final result is the sweet spot that put a smile on our faces!”