Luxman AT-3000

Name: Luxman AT-3000
Brand: Luxman

The Luxman AT-3000 was the company's top FM/AM tuner of its period. The Vintage Knob calls it "certainly a FM reference" of its era. Vintageshock agrees, and says the technical specifications were comparable to the competition of the day, but the build quality and design set it apart. It "remained in the memory for the quality of its design, beautifully made," with particular praise for the steel front face and an overall impression of elegance.

Inside, the AT-3000 used a five-gang variable capacitance diode for the RF stage, four ICs in the intermediate frequency stage with a ceramic filter, and a PLL controlling both the FM tuning and the linear scale frequency display. It had a ±400 kHz IF shift - a "variable IF width" feature - and an AM stereo decoder built around an IC, which The Vintage Knob notes was a new concept at the time. The tuning display was a 7-digit digital readout that could alternate between frequency and time. An optional AT-3000D digital clock-remote control was available. Manual scanning worked by supplying control voltage to that five-gang front-end capacitance diode.

It's a big unit: 438 × 155 × 367 mm and 11.0 kg, covering FM, MW, and LW wavebands.

Collectors should know about a couple of issues. The dial glass is prone to cracking or delamination, and the internal AM/FM scale can shift during transport - a common problem with this model. It's also one of the rarer Luxman tuners on the secondhand market, and Vintageshock considers it a "very good value" when one does appear.

Production years, original price, and detailed performance figures like sensitivity, selectivity, or stereo separation are not documented. If those specs exist in a service manual or brochure, they haven't surfaced in the sources available to the Archive.