Luxman WL515 (1968)

The Luxman WL515 is an FM/AM tuner released in December 1968 at a price of ¥44,000. It's a compact, solidly built unit from Luxman's late-1960s era, when the company was moving to solid-state designs while still refining analog tuner circuitry. The WL515 was an early adopter of FETs and ICs. The front end is a cascode amplifier with an FET for high sensitivity and good signal-to-noise, and another FET handles frequency conversion. The intermediate frequency amplification runs five stages, and there is a muting circuit. The AM section is simpler, with one stage of high-frequency amplification and one intermediate-frequency stage.

The tuner covers the Japanese FM band of 76-90 MHz (not the 88-108 MHz used in North America and Europe), plus AM from 525-1605 kHz. FM sensitivity is rated at 2 µV (IHF practical), with a signal-to-noise ratio of 60 dB or better and distortion of 1% or less. Channel separation is 38 dB at 1 kHz. The output voltage is specified at 1V, and the antenna input accepts both 300Ω balanced and 75Ω unbalanced feeds. Internally, it uses 21 silicon transistors, 3 FETs, 3 ICs, 21 diodes, and 1 SCR. Power consumption is a modest 15VA.

The WL515 measures 450mm wide, 147.5mm high, and 268mm deep, and weighs 7.6kg. The FM band is a real limitation. A unit like this only picks up stations in Japan (or other regions using the 76-90 MHz allocation), so a WL515 found outside Japan today has limited practical use for FM. The AM band is standard.

Documentation on the WL515 is thin. Beyond the specifications above and a handful of used listings, little is recorded about its market positioning, reception by reviewers, or how it compared to contemporaries. A Russian listing from Novosibirsk asking 25,000 rubles and a few recent international sales in the $460-$536 range suggest some collector interest, but no formal reviews or owner accounts surfaced in research.

Known specifications:

- **Type:** FM/AM tuner

- **Release date:** December 1968

- **Original price:** ¥44,000

- **FM range:** 76–90 MHz

- **AM range:** 525–1605 kHz

- **FM sensitivity:** 2 µV (IHF)

- **FM S/N:** 60 dB or more

- **FM distortion:** 1% or less

- **Channel separation:** 38 dB (1 kHz)

- **Dimensions:** 450 × 147.5 × 268 mm

- **Weight:** 7.6 kg