Luxman NT-07

I had been listening to my Luxman P100-C headphone amplifier and DA-07x DAC and was very very happy (see amplifier review on Stassen). All this while my music was sourced from an old laptop and an external hard drive. This laptop was not specially conditioned for music streaming (10 yr old MacPro). It was using Luxman propriety play back software (I have no idea what it does), USB to DAC. It is all you need, and that would be my set up for years to come. Bits are bits and by all the science I have seen this should not make a darn difference. You can loop a digital message 100 times over a miles long network from any crappy source (a digital version of the Chinese Whisper experiment) and it always arrives bit perfect. Nothing deteriorates. The timing domain is entirely dealt with in the DAC. Nothing can go wrong and in trillions of daily cases nothing ever does go wrong (our society would end in chaos if it did). Being a scientist myself I know that explanations do need to make physical sense, and that engineers understand this stuff better than I do, or most of us listeners. Better not argue from a point of ignorance. Trust the science. I am also well aware of what bias can do to peoples perceptions as this is a key task in my daily work. Our mind plays a lot of tricks on us and yet we are utterly convinced that we are in control and that we are objective. Most of the time we are not. People who hear difference in cables or burning in equipment I ascribe to neural conditioning. At some point your brain clicks into the music and it starts to sound differently. And that tends to take a while. In reality of course nothing is burning in, certainly not copper cables or transistors. This is not a mechanical piston engine with thousands of moving parts scraping past each other with frictional abrasion. And if the few moving mechanical components like speaker cones actually do (and maybe so do old school tube triodes), most of it will happen in the first few minutes and the performance gradually deteriorates from there on. Just like with a combustion engine if you like that analogue… Not a good thing. But I could not help my curiosity, and being open to new experiences, or challenging my own biases, I thought that for once and for all I could make an end to the audiophile rabbit hole by purchasing the Luxman NT-07 streamer. If I didn’t hear any difference there, I knew that my quest for sonic improvements had reached its physical limitations, and that would be a satisfying end to it. In the worst case it is a nice piece of furniture and a more convenient platform to play music from. My laptop was old anyhow and would not last another summer. This was a case of negative bias. My expectation was that it would not make any difference, simply because it can’t. The DAC takes care of any jitter or noise in the feed and it doesn’t matter if the bits come from a cranky old laptop or a 20,000 euro streamer through a golden Cat 8 cable. But as soon as I connected the NT-07 to the same external hard disk, the music was different. Immediately. Not just a single detail or some coloration, or subtle “veil lifting”, but the whole spatial representation, the whole picture was radically different. It was obvious in the first album, and in my disbelief I repeated the tests over several days with other albums that I knew very well on this system, and had heard recently. Some albums I did not even recognise anymore. One evening I had listened to Buena Vista Social Club, with lots of new insights, and to wrap it all up I decided to listen to two well know songs from Van Morrison and literally put it to bed. I could not believe my ears. I ended up listening to all 19 songs of the album and was flabbergasted. Was this a different recording? This just made no sense. It may still be all bias and imagination, mind you. Maybe it was a full moon… I know that every time I listen to music it does sound a little bit different depending on mood etc, and my subconscious of course cannot fully ignore the fact that there is a new piece of equipment in the chain, but it took me by surprise and grabbed me by the scruff. So obviously I am a happy customer, but I still do not know if it is real. Too much hassle trying to do the blind ABX tests, and I am perfectly happy now to stay in my bubble. Why burst a perfectly happy place? I may be a scientist, I am also a human being and know when not to disturb a good thing. If you ask people if they rather be smart or happy (the Pinky or the Brain test), most will choose Pinky (even among scientists). Maybe this is the trap of the audiophile. And maybe, just maybe, the audiophiles are really on to something in this case, trusting their senses, and that the digital source really can make a difference. After all, engineers and scientists do not know everything that happens in the universe, or what exactly to measure, and nature has a habit to throw a surprise now and then. Theoretical dogmas are just as much prone to (confirmation) bias as subjective aural perceptions. Geophysicists told us that continents could not possibly drift. It was physically impossible and you only need to hit a rock to intuitively sense that this made sense. Yet every child could see that the map fitted together and there was lots of other supporting observations… Coincidence, misinterpretation, bias, blindness, illusions, dogmas? All of the above. So I am still on the fence. I have always perceived a difference between the CD player and the same file streaming from a hard disk (over the same DAC), also with other equipment (the Moon CD 3.3 vs the same cranky laptop and the Audio Research CD9 vs the Lumin U1 Mini), but not as strong. In this case I went from one extreme end member to another; a noisy unprepared laptop, to a high-end dedicated streamer, over a very detailed and revealing system. The difference was much bigger than I could have had imagined. But I leave that judgement to you. The Luxman NT-07 is excellent and works flawlessly with good robust software and easy handling. It is also very well built. Highly recommended, from both Pinky and the Brain. Special thanks to Stassen for prompt delivery and good client service.