Yeah, funny a lot of lesser amps in various price ranges get a lot of attention here but it’s hard to find a thread about Luxman or Marantz gear for example, both brands that aren’t sponsors. Both brands aren’t listed as Roon tested devices either (Marantz was just recently added) and that’s because Roon requires them to send them the gear to test. Luxman and Marantz Dacs/CD players work fine with Roon though, I had a few of them.
Luxman deseves a lot more attention here. I once compared my previous P-1u to the McIntosh headphone at almost double the price. The McIntosh is a Dac / integrated amp / headphone amp but marketed as a headphone system and while it sounded nice, once compared with the P-1u the phones out of the McIntosh kindof sounded like an afterthought.
I had a few headphone amps from Luxman: P-1u, SQ-N100 and now the P-750u and SQ-N150. They beat just about every other brand of headphone amps I had or auditioned, only Eddie Current was in the same league.
If you want to have a tube amp as well I highly recommend the SQ-N150. It can drive any headphone from its single-ended headphone output but I even had a speaker output to balanced headphone adapter made by Forza Audioworks to be able to connect my phones balanced. As the speaker output is 10W Class A I only recommend doing that for high impedance dynamics and hard to drive planars of course.
I also have the DA-06 and L-509X. I used to have TOTL Marantz speaker amps but the Luxman is something else entirely. It has a lot more power, detail, space and control over my seakers than the Marantz amps I had of the same to double the power rating. I’s a pretty expensive integrated but so worth it. I compared it to Marantz, Rotel Michi, Classé and McIntosh before I bought it but to me it was a clear winner.
