System History
In 1988, I became the fortunate owner of an audiophile-grade stereo system, thanks to my dad and Byron Yang of Sound of Peoria who set me up with a great selection of quality components which started me off right. Those components were:
- Luxman R-115 receiver - transparent and powerful, bright recordings don't soften up through this amp
- Dahlquist M-905 speakers - transparent and musical, can be light on bass
- 10 gauge fine stranded OFC Monster cable, 8 feet x 2 - bare wires only on all terminals
- Typical entry level Philips CD player - the SP/DIF out turned out to be important
- Generic interconnects between disc player and amp
Let's just say the Luxman is well liked. That thing is built like a tank and its a total powerhouse, delivering very accurate and neutral amplification with loads of extra headroom and a high damping factor. It is very enjoyable to listen to. Although its specs read very conservatively at 70 watts per channel, the truth is this amp can deliver peaks of 270 watts per channel into 2 ohm loads without breaking a sweat.
The Dahlquists are also gems, which can tend be overlooked in the used market, but offer a compelling value for the prices they fetch. Frequency response goes up to 24kHz, and being 2 way speakers, there is less damage done to the sound by crossovers when compared to many 3 way speakers. The woofer is only 8 inches in diameter, but it is very agile, accurate and has a long throw. When coupled with the Luxman, there is an amazing amount of tight, musical bass to be enjoyed. Adding in a sub fills out that lower octave quite sufficiently.
Component Upgrades and Additions
Over the years I upgraded a few items:
- Audio Alchemy Dac-In-The-Box outboard DA converter (around 2000)
- Wireworld Atlantis III 1 meter interconnects (around 2001)
- Improved disc players (various DVD and blueray players, all with SP/DIF out)
- Denon DSW-30 powered subwoofer (Thanks Gregg)
I think most people would not drop $120 on a pair of 1 meter interconnect cables, but let me tell you, I was shocked that this one change made such an audible improvement in quality. The highs became noticeably smoother and the ambiance of the reproduced sound was enhanced. Even for casual listeners, this change was immediate and obvious. If you have a high quality signal chain that is truly transparent (as this one seems to be), you may be surprised at how much of a difference such a small item can make.
Similarly, the outboard DITB converter brought a marked improvement to the playback quality of the entire system. Bass was given more definition, and the upper mid-range and sibilance elements were given more delicate treatment. I think that unit maybe cost $150 or so - very worth the upgrade.
Malfunction Junction
Sadly, the Luxman amplifier section eventually succumbed to damage due to its age sometime around 2010. After doing a little research, it seems that most R-115s eventually develop the same problem: a mechanical relay for the output stage starts disengaging randomly. This happens in small bits at first, but soon the unit simply will not engage the relay at all and there is no signal provided to the speakers from then on. I just packed the unit away in storage and forgot about it for a few years.
Repair Rescue
Fast forward to 2015, as I worked my way cleaning through some items from storage and saw the Luxman, I was sad about not being able to enjoy it, so I started a search for someone to repair it. Thankfully, I found the perfect repair shop to take care of this: stereorehab.com. They were able to quickly perform a thorough repair and reconditioning job that brought the system back to life, possibly to a state that was even better than it was before. After just a few hours of listening, I was hooked again!
Starting Over, Again
Sometimes when I take a break from a pursuit and re-engage it after a lengthy hiatus, the fresh perspective brings some really good things to light. I have been catching up with what's been going on in this space, and there are some truly revolutionary changes under foot, especially regarding improvements to how digital audio is processed. The site computeraudiophile.com is a great source of information for those interested in the topic.
Latest Upgrades
I have recently added a new outboard DA converter that handles all manner of high resolution bitstream formats up to 384KB/sec DXD/PCM and DSD128 too. I have also been testing several different open source computer audiophile playback systems, running on everything from vanilla PCs to Raspberry Pi boards, with varying degrees of success. These will all be the topic of future posts, but suffice it to say that I have never heard sound that is anywhere close to this sweet coming from this system before. It still has me dropping my jaw that for years, I owned a system which was this capable, if only it were fed input from such clean sources! Many of these amazing recordings are freely obtained within the high resolution audio community as demo tracks. However, even my large collection meager CD/Redbook rips have been seriously upgraded through simple, on-the-fly upsampling. There really is a lot of good information in those files! As it turns out, some fine details about how the information is extracted back out is critical to the final listening quality.
More to come!
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