Luxman began in Osaka in 1925, as the radio department of a picture-frame company called Kinsuido, in the year radio broadcasting started in Japan. The department outlasted the frames. A century later the company marked its hundredth anniversary with the CENTENNIAL line, which is an anniversary very few audio manufacturers will ever have occasion to celebrate.
Two proprietary circuits define the current amplifiers. The first is LIFES, the Luxman Integrated Feedback Engine System, which replaced the ODNF topology the company had used since 1999 — feeding back only the distortion components generated on the way to the output stage, so the amplifier behaves much as a no-feedback design would while keeping the linearity feedback provides. Luxman states LIFES more than halves the distortion of the previous generation and improves signal-to-noise by over 3dB. The second is LECUA, the company's electronically controlled attenuator, which handles volume in precise steps without the channel imbalance and wear that a conventional potentiometer accumulates.
The range is built around integrated amplifiers — the L-509Z at the top, the L-507Z and L-505Z below it, and the L-100 CENTENNIAL running in pure Class A — alongside separate pre- and power amplifiers, a vacuum tube line in the CL-38uC and MQ-88uC, digital and network players, turntables including the PD-191A, phono stages, and the P-100 CENTENNIAL headphone amplifier.
A Luxman integrated with a pair of loudspeakers from Sonus faber or MoFi is one of the most direct routes to a serious system in a single afternoon — arrange a listen and hear where the century went.
