Lumin Thread

Audiolab 9000N
Fiftyfifty said:
Costing nothing beyond an Audirvana subscription and FM Joshua's DIY USB cable, the Macbook Air served me well. Now after close to Rs. 10 lacs down the tube, I ask, like the guy in the Royal Stag commercial 'Have I made it large?' ;)
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How are you connecting Lumin to your DAC? I am asking because AES/SPDIF is way better than USB in on DAC.

As for your spending, I/we can only suggest and it is up to the audience whether to believe/try it or not. I am not sure if you saw my several posts on the importance of good LPS. Just to give you an idea, the SMPS inside one of your LUMIN's cost just $50 (or even less for folks like Lumin) while the cost of a moderately good LPS starts around $300.
 
sidvee said:
There are a lot of threads/posts in various forums saying that adding fibre this or adding filter that or adding such and such lpsu etc. etc. will make a huge night and day difference, but ime they are only marginal incremental improvements - unless there is some gross issues with your power or there is some major issues with internet speeds
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I respectfully disagree. One needs to have the foundation right to realize the full potential of a DAC. After spending last 3-4 years in this area, my conclusion is that all these reviews on the internet where DACs have been reviewed and judged based on their USB input are just wrong. A solid digital transport foundation could change the whole perspective.

As for improvement being marginal or substantial, I get your perspective but we all probably give different weights to different kind of improvements.
 
bornfi said:
How are you connecting Lumin to your DAC? I am asking because AES/SPDIF is way better than USB in on DAC.

As for your spending, I/we can only suggest and it is up to the audience whether to believe/try it or not. I am not sure if you saw my several posts on the importance of good LPS. Just to give you an idea, the SMPS inside one of your LUMIN's cost just $50 (or even less for folks like Lumin) while the cost of a moderately good LPS starts around $300.
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Yes, I use AES/EBU for all my digital connections.
A good LPS can surely add value. The L2 doesn't have a mod for that yet. The U2, however, has a built in LPS and is said to sound good on its own, even without the L2.
 
Fiftyfifty said:
What you say is very true @Yelamanchili manohar . In my setup, I am quite confident about my downstream components as there are other sources connected to them that sound good to me. My power conditioning and ethernet cabling is also pretty sound. That means the improvements in the sq of the streamer need to come from or around the streamer itself, most likely from adequate burn in.
It's also true that improvements from going fibre and LPS may be marginal, as I don't believe that Lumin would make a product that would not sound good unless these additional components are installed, or make a U2 that would not sound good without the L2.

So, it's either burn-in or burn-out!
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Please leave it switched on for a few days sir. And if you are OCD like me, then you can switch off for 2 hrs everyday, to help the caps in the power supply form properly. And if you are using Aes-Ebu, then it is best to keep the Lumin switched on for atleast one hour before your listening session. And keep it on a stable surface where it is not moved. This helps stabilize clocks, as the clock inside the Lumin will be used for the conversion inside the Dac too. When using USB it does'nt matter as the clocks inside the dac are used.

I found improvements with burn-in in my situation. The fiber input will not be a night and day shift, depending on how noisy your network is. Mine was very polluted, hence the improvements in mine were very noticeable. Since this is a bottle neck in my system, I've recently bought a network switch and associated cabling to address this issue. And considering the improvements Iam seeing with cleaning up the sources at the top, I've also recently bought my first ever "snake oil" usb cable.

I knew I didnt have great power coming off the wall socket, but the introduction of the Niagra, showed how important clean power was. My future spends will be going into addressing power supply till I get it sorted.

The few things I did upstream, though very benign sounding on paper, have transformed the system completely. My last big improvement was room treatment a few years back. This was as big as that.
 
Yelamanchili manohar said:
Please leave it switched on for a few days sir. And if you are OCD like me, then you can switch off for 2 hrs everyday, to help the caps in the power supply form properly. And if you are using Aes-Ebu, then it is best to keep the Lumin switched on for atleast one hour before your listening session. And keep it on a stable surface where it is not moved. This helps stabilize clocks, as the clock inside the Lumin will be used for the conversion inside the Dac too. When using USB it does'nt matter as the clocks inside the dac are used.

I found improvements with burn-in in my situation. The fiber input will not be a night and day shift, depending on how noisy your network is. Mine was very polluted, hence the improvements in mine were very noticeable. Since this is a bottle neck in my system, I've recently bought a network switch and associated cabling to address this issue. And considering the improvements Iam seeing with cleaning up the sources at the top, I've also recently bought my first ever "snake oil" usb cable.

I knew I didnt have great power coming off the wall socket, but the introduction of the Niagra, showed how important clean power was. My future spends will be going into addressing power supply till I get it sorted.

The few things I did upstream, though very benign sounding on paper, have transformed the system completely. My last big improvement was room treatment a few years back. This was as big as that.
Click to expand...
Thanks @Yelamanchili manohar your inputs on this subject have been invaluable.

As suggested, I will leave both the L2 and U2 switched on for around 10 days. I can play music from my stored files on repeat, without switching on the DAC.

My power comes from a dedicated phase in my DB box to an online UPS and from there to a Puritan Labs PSM136. The Niagara may or may not be a better product but I guess I'm fairly well covered on this front.

As regards network noise, I do not have a clue. I do not know if there can be inherent issues in the network quality provided by the ISP and how these can be addressed. The Trendnet switch in combination with the L2 and the fibre cables should do some good. Additionally, the LPS on the router should help. A point to be noted is that the U2 buffers music, continues playing the current song even if its network connection is temporarily detached. It is not as though the sq suddenly jumps up when disconnected, so the improvements brought in with the additional switch and fibre are unlikely to be dramatic.

Burn in, therefore, appears to be the need of the hour, or 300 hours :)
 
bornfi said:
I respectfully disagree. One needs to have the foundation right to realize the full potential of a DAC. After spending last 3-4 years in this area, my conclusion is that all these reviews on the internet where DACs have been reviewed and judged based on their USB input are just wrong. A solid digital transport foundation could change the whole perspective.

As for improvement being marginal or substantial, I get your perspective but we all probably give different weights to different kind of improvements.
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Its fine bornfi, just sharing my perspective after having gone through 10-12 years of doo dads for streamers and file based servers, like filters, lpsu's, clocks including 6-7 streamers and about 12 usb dac's, and about 5-6 different usb cables, before arriving at my current mid-fi Aurender n200 and entry level lumin u2 mini. I also have many coax and aes/ebu cables lying around which I don't use as I listen to quite a few dsd128 files. Most likely I am wrong in my view, perhaps my system or even hearing is not up par and perhaps I have a compromised foundation as you rightly mentioned.
Cheers,
Sid
 
sidvee said:
Its fine bornfi, just sharing my perspective after having gone through 10-12 years of doo dads for streamers and file based servers, like filters, lpsu's, clocks including 6-7 streamers and about 12 usb dac's, and about 5-6 different usb cables, before arriving at my current mid-fi Aurender n200 and entry level lumin u2 mini. I also have many coax and aes/ebu cables lying around which I don't use as I listen to quite a few dsd128 files. Most likely I am wrong in my view, perhaps my system or even hearing is not up par and perhaps I have a compromised foundation as you rightly mentioned.
Cheers,
Sid
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Thanks, @sidvee, for taking my comments in right spirits. As I mentioned somewhere, though I like the sound of my system but not the number of boxes it has now. In order to overcome this, I got an opportunity to try dCS' Network bridge and preferred my computer based system to this. The clarity was there in both the systems but my computer-based system sounded more natural with expansive soundstage than very clean, comparitively narrow-soundstage and laser-sharp imagery that I found very electronicky of dCS.

Since that day, I have not been able to gather courage to try any streamers altogether. Although I have Aurender and Lumin in my try-to list but I am not very positive about the outcome as of now.
 
bornfi said:
but my computer-based system sounded more natural with expansive soundstage than very clean, comparitively narrow-soundstage and laser-sharp imagery that I found very electronicky of dCS.
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I have found the same of DCS, ( I heard the Dcs bartok older version - before I bought a Bricasti ), to me it is lean sounding. Anyways there are many other options available, the key to my ears is - if it is an all in one streamer/DAC, then the DAC portion is very critical in the influencing the overall tonality. Hence I prefer to separate both which gives me flexibility. I had the Lumin D2 before and really enjoyed the unit with its wolfson DAC chips, I also heard the Lumin T2 but I heard a very lean sound mainly (imo atleast due to the ESS dac chips), so I opted for the u2 mini rather than the upgraded T3 which also has ESS chipset.
Anyways all these are my personal preferences, and this is not a fact, I am probably wrong in my assumptions - which I am most of the times.
Cheers,
Sid
 
Fiftyfifty said:
Thanks @Yelamanchili manohar your inputs on this subject have been invaluable.

As suggested, I will leave both the L2 and U2 switched on for around 10 days. I can play music from my stored files on repeat, without switching on the DAC.

My power comes from a dedicated phase in my DB box to an online UPS and from there to a Puritan Labs PSM136. The Niagara may or may not be a better product but I guess I'm fairly well covered on this front.

As regards network noise, I do not have a clue. I do not know if there can be inherent issues in the network quality provided by the ISP and how these can be addressed. The Trendnet switch in combination with the L2 and the fibre cables should do some good. Additionally, the LPS on the router should help. A point to be noted is that the U2 buffers music, continues playing the current song even if its network connection is temporarily detached. It is not as though the sq suddenly jumps up when disconnected, so the improvements brought in with the additional switch and fibre are unlikely to be dramatic.

Burn in, therefore, appears to be the need of the hour, or 300 hours :)
Click to expand...
You seem to be very well sorted noise isolation wise, both for power and network. By all available accounts, the Puritan is better than the Niagra till the Niagra 3000 atleast. And with the Lumin L2 the network is sorted. So those two bottle necks are definitely not there in your case.

Having said that, I would consider the investments made so far as the foundation to build a digital system upon. Even after burn-in, your good selves might not realize the same benefits that I, and some users on forums are reporting. I would'nt loose heart at that. I would consider it as the elimination of one stage, and will progress to improve the next stage which will be the dac or preamp or power amp or the speakers, which ever are the next bottle neck in the system. And when the next bottle neck is removed, the cumulative effects of the removed bottle neck + improvements with the Lumin will come through together. Will be difficult to say which has contributed how much. Unless you remove the lumin and use your usual streamer again. I know that we all expect instant improvements considering the scale of investment. But day and night differences only come with improving the bottle neck, as has happened in my case.
 
Yelamanchili manohar said:
You seem to be very well sorted noise isolation wise, both for power and network. By all available accounts, the Puritan is better than the Niagra till the Niagra 3000 atleast. And with the Lumin L2 the network is sorted. So those two bottle necks are definitely not there in your case.

Having said that, I would consider the investments made so far as the foundation to build a digital system upon. Even after burn-in, your good selves might not realize the same benefits that I, and some users on forums are reporting. I would'nt loose heart at that. I would consider it as the elimination of one stage, and will progress to improve the next stage which will be the dac or preamp or power amp or the speakers, which ever are the next bottle neck in the system. And when the next bottle neck is removed, the cumulative effects of the removed bottle neck + improvements with the Lumin will come through together. Will be difficult to say which has contributed how much. Unless you remove the lumin and use your usual streamer again. I know that we all expect instant improvements considering the scale of investment. But day and night differences only come with improving the bottle neck, as has happened in my case.
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Thanks Manohar. It has been a long journey to get the Dac + amp + speakers combination right. I'm very happy with what i hear from my other sources - the CDT and phono. So the streamer either works for me after the planned actions, or it doesn't.

In fact, even the Silent Angel sounded pretty good, particularly with it's dedicated Bonn N8 network switch It's just that at almost 10x the cost, I was expecting more from the Lumin. And it's likely I'll get there after burn in.
 
How does the AES/EBU or BNC output compare with the USB output of the Lumin? I currently use a microrendu whose usb output is fantastic but it only supports roon and upnp. I really hate the roon tax and am forced to use bubbleupnp which isn't very friendly. Thinking of replacing it with the Lumin U2 or U2 mini + LPSU.

Has anyone compared the quality of both? I'd rather buy the hardware and use Lumin's app than pay roon tax,
 
reignofchaos said:
How does the AES/EBU or BNC output compare with the USB output of the Lumin? I currently use a microrendu whose usb output is fantastic but it only supports roon and upnp. I really hate the roon tax and am forced to use bubbleupnp which isn't very friendly. Thinking of replacing it with the Lumin U2 or U2 mini + LPSU.

Has anyone compared the quality of both? I'd rather buy the hardware and use Lumin's app than pay roon tax,
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I was mostly using coaxial output till now. Did try USB out a few times, but the coaxial cable is better than the generic usb cable Iam using. Besides, my dac is old, and its usb implementation is dated. Thus, I find coaxial sounding better to my ears.

To add to the above, the newer / latest clocks in the Lumin, compared to the older clocks in the dac, will also help make it sound better over spdif sources like coax etc. So its not an apples to apples comparison, and really difficult to make out in my situation.
 
reignofchaos said:
How does the AES/EBU or BNC output compare with the USB output of the Lumin? I currently use a microrendu whose usb output is fantastic but it only supports roon and upnp. I really hate the roon tax and am forced to use bubbleupnp which isn't very friendly. Thinking of replacing it with the Lumin U2 or U2 mini + LPSU.

Has anyone compared the quality of both? I'd rather buy the hardware and use Lumin's app than pay roon tax,
Click to expand...
I tried the Lumin u2 mini aes/ebu to a lampizator baltic dac. To my ears against the usb I couldn't tell much of a difference. If anything on 16/44 files, I felt the usb was better - Anyways just what I heard fwiw (Maybe my estimate of difference is not what others may hear), plus I am just using the u2 mini as is, no other enhancements. However the Aurender n200 which I use in that system sounded much better with the usb, albeit at a higher price level but at par with the u2 I believe.
Cheers,
Sid
 
Does Aurender work with any other software barring their own? My worry is if the company goes under, the device is a brick.
 
reignofchaos said:
Does Aurender work with any other software barring their own? My worry is if the company goes under, the device is a brick.
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No aurender only works with their app. But they were going to introduce new models with roon certification. Aurender is big enough and established to outlast whatever kit we buy from them today.
 
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