LUXMAN L-590AX Mark II

The external look have not changed a lot - the new Mark II has thin golden line around its VU meters, black feet instead of silver ones, and the polarity switches on its rear panel are now sliders. Luxman also innovated its ODNF circuit. The "Only Distortion Negative Feedback version 4.0 virtually feeds back only distortion components generated during amplification to extend the bandwidth of the amplifier to 20-100,000Hz and increase S/N ratio to to 107dB which is among the best for an integrated amplifier. The beauty of such a solution lies in feeding back only a ‘corrupted’ part of signal – should there is no distortion present in the signal the ODNS circuitry remains idle. There is also improved winding of the power supply and there is a new discreet buffer in the preamplfier section - thus the Mark II's damping grew up by 30%.

Principally, the L-590AX Mark II is a bipolar amp with push-pull topology in pure class A, achieving 2x30 sweet watts into 8 ohm load or 2x60W sweet watts into 4 ohm load. The rear panel of the the Mark II shows typical array of connections: four RCA line inputs, two XLR balanced inputs, MM/MC inputs, a recorder inputs and a PRE-OUT option. With the Mark II it is possible to use two pairs of speakers connected to switchable binding posts that accept any type of a speaker wire’s termination in case you manage to remove a tiny plug that seals them.

The new LECUA 1000WM attenuator (the LECUA stands for Luxman Electric Controlled Ultimate Attenuator and the WM stands for Weighting Matrix) is the Luxman's ´ultimate attenuator´ that aspires to be the first absolutely lossless attenuator ever. It converts the music signal from a voltage into a current, controls gain, and then reconverts the current into a voltage. A position of the volume knob is detected by sensors to be consequently evaluated by processor board that controls the current switches combinations, not unlike Accuphase’s AAVA volume control works. As the LECUA does not imply any impedance changes there is no deterioration of S/N ratio and frequency response remains totally uniform and there is virtually zero tracking difference between both channels. The entire process is carried out in analog domain including electrical suppression of RFI and EMI interferences.