Mark Levinson No. 39
A CD processor that carried the Madrigal-era Levinson name into the digital age — and the price tag to match.
Overview
The Mark Levinson No. 39 is a compact disc processor — the DAC half of a two-box CD front end, designed to be paired with a separate transport. In the Madrigal-era Levinson lineup it sat below the flagship No. 30.5/No. 31.5 converter-and-transport combination that Audio (May 1997, p.176) reviewed as offering more low-level detail than its predecessors. The same review noted the No. 39 at a price of $5,995 — a figure that places it firmly in the upper tier of late-1990s digital.
That price is the first thing collectors mention, and it's the right place to start. Six thousand dollars for a converter in the late 1990s was serious money — the kind of money that bought you a box built to sit in a rack next to a No. 31.5 and not look out of place. The No. 39 was positioned as the more attainable path into Levinson digital, and Audio's reviewer treated it as exactly that: a reference point against which the more expensive No. 31.5 could be measured, and a machine that made the case that the gap between the flagship and the step-down model was narrower than the price difference suggested.
What the No. 39 actually is, in use, is a processor — one box of a two-box system.
The No. 39 is not a standalone CD player. That's a distinction worth making plainly, because the model number and the Levinson name lead plenty of people to assume otherwise. It's a processor, and buying one today means buying into a two-box architecture — transport plus converter — with all the cabling and matching that implies.
Where the No. 39 sits in the broader Levinson story is as a Madrigal-era digital component, built during the period when the company was pushing hard into CD playback with the same seriousness it had brought to amplification. The No. 30.5 and No. 31.5 were the statement pieces; the No. 39 was the model that let more listeners into that world without the flagship outlay. Whether that made it a bargain or a compromise is the question every used buyer has to answer for themselves, and the honest answer is that it depends on what's feeding it and what's downstream.
It's a niche within a niche: a Levinson converter from the era when separate transports and processors were the only serious way to play a CD. Buyers should expect to hunt, and should expect to pay for the privilege of owning a piece of Madrigal-era digital engineering with the Levinson badge on the front.
The practical caveats are the ones that come with any 1990s digital gear. Laser assemblies in transports wear, and a processor is only as good as the signal it's fed. The No. 39 itself has no transport to fail, which is one argument in its favor for long-term ownership — the box that does the converting is the simpler, more durable half of the equation.
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