Luxman D-007 (1986)
¥298,000 of mid-eighties Japanese digital ambition - and the laser you'll never find a spare for.
Overview
Two hundred ninety-eight thousand yen. That's what Luxman asked for the D-007 when it landed in 1986. It was the flagship compact disc player from a company that had spent the previous decade building its name on serious analog, and it was priced to match. The D-007 sat at the top of Luxman's digital lineup at launch, and the hardware under the lid backs up the price.
The centerpiece is a pair of 20-bit Analog Devices AD7668 DAC chips running in dual configuration. In 1986 the market was still mostly single- or dual-16-bit designs, so a dual 20-bit architecture put the D-007 in rare company. Luxman wrapped that conversion stage in a die-cast aluminum frame and a double-layer chassis, gave the audio section its own dedicated power supply, and fitted the rear panel with both coaxial and glass-fiber optical digital outputs. The whole package measures 438mm wide, 95mm high, and 293mm deep, and weighs 5.7 kg. That's heavy for a CD player of the period, and the chassis and supply work are the reason.
The measured performance holds up better than a lot of mid-eighties digital. Frequency response is quoted at 5Hz - 20kHz, total harmonic distortion at 0.0025% at 1kHz, signal-to-noise ratio at 112dB, and channel separation at greater than 110dB at 1kHz, with a 2V output at 100Ω impedance. Power consumption is a modest 25W. Those distortion and noise figures were competitive in their day and remain respectable now.
Luxman also built in its Duo-Beta circuitry, a feedback-loop topology the company developed in the 1980s to reduce distortion. To suppress read errors the player uses what the documentation calls "massive interpolation," upsampling from the 44.1kHz sampling rate to 176.4kHz. Audio Heritage notes the D-007 was intended to be paired with the separate D-008 digital processor if the owner wanted to go further. In Japan the player has since picked up a reputation as something of a cult classic.
Key Features
Dual 20-bit AD7668 Conversion
The original D-007 runs a pair of Analog Devices AD7668 chips in a dual 20-bit arrangement. Most competing players were still single- or dual-16-bit at the time, so Luxman went a full generation further on the conversion stage. Whether that was audible in 1986 is a question the period press didn't settle.
Die-Cast Aluminum Frame and Double-Layer Chassis
The 5.7 kg weight tells you something. A die-cast aluminum frame and double-layer chassis is expensive to make and does nothing for the spec sheet, but it does a lot for mechanical stability and vibration control. That's the kind of engineering that separates a flagship from a well-specified midrange deck.
Separate Power Supply for the Audio Section
Luxman put the audio circuitry on its own power supply rather than sharing one across the whole player. It's a plain, unglamorous decision that costs money and board space, and it's the sort of thing that gets cut first when a manufacturer is building to a price. The D-007's ¥298,000 price tag is what bought it.
Duo-Beta Circuitry and Massive Interpolation
Duo-Beta was Luxman's in-house answer to distortion in the feedback loop, developed during the 1980s and used here in the analog output stage. On the digital side, the error-suppression scheme interpolates from 44.1kHz up to 176.4kHz. That's four-times oversampling, aimed at masking read errors rather than letting them through as audible artifacts.
Coaxial and Glass-Fiber Optical Digital Outputs
The rear panel carries both a coaxial and a glass-fiber optical digital output. That lets the D-007 work as a transport into an outboard converter, including, per Audio Heritage, Luxman's own D-008 digital processor. The optical output is glass-fiber rather than the cheaper plastic type, which is another small sign of where this player sat in the lineup.
Historical Context
The D-007 was Luxman's flagship CD player at its 1986 introduction, and by the end of the decade it had been folded into a broader system concept. HiFI-Stereo (January 1990, p.84) grouped the D-007 with the A-007 integrated amplifier and T-007 tuner as half of Luxman's "Design Series" lineup, characterizing the series as modest in size but maximum in performance.
Sorting out the versions takes some care, and the record isn't complete. The original 1986 model used the AD7668 chips. A "D-007 II" appeared around 1987/88 carrying the same basic design and DAC. Then, in late 1988, a later D-007 - sometimes called "D-007 Limited" - switched to Burr-Brown PCM1702 chips running in balanced mode. The relationship between these designations is not fully documented. One source suggests the "II" label may have been a later factory badge change or a different-market designation, but that explanation is explicitly speculative. Units wearing a "Limited" badge on the front have been described as D-007 II units based on serial number, which only adds to the confusion.
Collectibility & Value
The D-007's reputation in Japan is strong. One reviewer with more than three decades in audio called it one of the best CD players he has ever heard, praising a rich, dynamic, layered sound and a huge soundstage, and saying it makes you forget you're listening to a CD. The PCM1702-equipped Limited version gets a slightly different description: relaxed, organic, and musical rather than analytical, with no digital glare or grain. The same reviewer concedes that in absolute terms it isn't the last word in resolution and the bass isn't the deepest or tightest, but judging it as a total package he finds it very musical indeed.
The practical picture is harsher. Spare parts, particularly the laser assembly, are no longer available from Luxman, and mechanisms and laser units are now nearly impossible to find. Owners report a familiar list of age-related failures: digital board faults, aging power supply capacitors, laser pickup issues, the transport belt, front-panel switches, and display driver chips or the display itself. Anyone buying one should expect to have it serviced. No live listings for the exact model were found at the time of research, so there's no reliable current market figure to quote. A HifiShark listing page exists, but without usable price data.
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