One year later, I actually got my hand on a A1, it has been in the Music Room for five days now, and so I feel like the long wait and interrogation is over. Spoiler alert: Good, not great.
When the importer came and install the Lumïn, in the first hour, it just didn't do it for me. There was a very light, but very disturbing, rythmic imbalance, like an turntable that isn't running smoothly and slightly changes speed during a rotation.
However some great qualities were there already: timbres were right, as was stereo imaging. And there was a flow to the music that indeed was reminiscent of LPs though, as I just said, not only the good things of LP (i.e. the subtle micro information and the overall balance of the message).
But after a couple of hours, thing improved significantly and everything was much cleaner, tighter, and rhythmically right. Already compared to the main Computer Audio solutions around, it was a clear winner: it did not have the coloration of a Linn streamer, the distortions of an Aurender, or of course the plain poorness of a Mac. But the real deal was with DSD files: the feeling of freedom was spectacular, the music was just flowing.
But the direct connection to the music still escaped. There was that same "noisy" quality I've heard on every ethernet based solution, like a light mist, or the legendary veil, over the music. I imagine some prefer their music that way, less disturbing, not demanding your attention but gently accompanying you, jazz-club style. And it does trigger the nostalgia of LPs time. But while I believe LPs have something to offer, I don't think the incapacity to produce a very sharp, very fast attack is what we want to mimick.
I plugged the digital audio of the Lumïn on my DAC but the results were mixed. When you turn the digital audio output on the Lumïn, its analog output suffers significantly, so A/B comparisons were irrelevant in that situation. I felt the digital output of the Lumïn wasn't very carefully made, which is logical for a machine that you could, after all, call an Ethernet DAC.
Two days in, I got my Antipodes Audio server back from a journalist. Using it as a NAS for the Lumïn improved the depth of timbres, made it sound less digital (it was a strong upgrade from my Sinology DS 213j -- I had installed a small sub network for the music, with cat 7 cables of 1m length or less, filtering the power for the Sino and the router as I found this improves the performance of digital renders a lot). In the first few hours, playing from the Antipodes gave a clearer, but too light sound, and the Lumïn had a physical impact and presence the Antipodes did not match.
However, a couple of hours in, the evanescence was gone and the clarity remained, and no matter how I tried it, those two were not playing in the same league. It felt like one was the original, intense and present, and the other the copy, foggy and reminiscent of the orignal. To be fair, they're not the same price either:
Lumïn A1 + Syno + Router is still under 7,500€ while
Antipodes +SOtM+ Dactablette is more of an 11,000€ thing -- but it does ripping and streaming from music services
Installing the Lumïn wasn't that easy -- at first I has some network issues that, to be fair, had nothing to do with the Lumïn. Then the Lumïn could not see my NAS until I actually installed minim server, which took some research to know, and then some installing of the right version of Java, and then minim (yes, DS Audio was already installed but...). The fact that the Lumïn app is only available for iPad felt like an obnoxious statement -- we only sell to people who do spend 700€ on a premium tablet, while would we bother with the other schmucks, even the ones that have iPhones but no iPads? Losers.
Still, I can see why many are enthralled about this machine. It is pleasantly musical and does nothing wrong, which is a lot. It doesn't give you the direct contact to the music that I expect, but it sings OK and is a beautiful object (mine came in black).
I won't keep this machine but I am considering trying its siblings, especially the smaller one. As you go downscale it's all about the compromises you chose to make, and there tends to be a clarity vs musicality tradeoff, so I'm not sure I wouldn't go the Lumïn way in the 5k range, especially as I expect the DSD to be very "singing". The fact that you have to optimize the NAS and network setup, burn your own CDs and not stream except using AirPlay is still a bummer, not to mention the iPad private party thing (but Bubble Upnp for Android works fine. It's just that you can't update your firmware with it. No biggie, right?).
