Luxman D-100r

Last month the D-100r arrived and I hooked it up in my office to Quad ESL57 and it sounded terrific with my iPhone. I was so impressed I asked Pandora for her opinion, I played some uncompressed music files on my iPhone for her – it sounded glorious.

Took it to Kyomi Audio & Music Direct in Chicago on the following Friday. On Thursday evening at Kyomi we compared the D-100r ($500) to an Esoteric (TEAC) P-03 / D-03 ($36,000).

We started off by hooking a $500 interconnect to the iPod dock and a prototype $10,000 interconnect to the Esoteric combo. We fed the Esoteric with a CD of Philip’s Demo XIV and loss-less files of the same material were installed on the iPhone. The Esoteric combo sounded dramatically better than the iPod dock in pretty much every respect – we were not surprised. Then, we swapped the interconnects and the results were quite surprising.

With the better interconnect the iPod dock was now quite close to the Esoteric; most enjoyable to listen to, the Esoteric still sounded better than the Luxman but by a considerably smaller margin.

Next day I played the iPod dock for Music Direct – they were most impressed also.  What a terrific way to share music with your friends. Our kids carry their music library with them on their iPhones, now they can show me what they are listening to…

Click here to continue reading about the D-100r!