Lumin P1

I start this review with a confession. I have consistently found that when I play CDs on a transport and feed the digital data via AES3 (AES/EBU) to a D/A processor, the music has more drive, particularly at low frequencies, than it does when I send the same 16/44.1 data to the same D/A processor via my network. However, these days I almost always stream my music rather than playing physical discs. Not only is it much more convenient; the wealth of metadata available with Roon 1.8 is addictive. I also have convenient access to much more music: my growing library of hi-rez files and hi-rez music streamed from Qobuz.

I don’t understand why there should be an audible difference between AES3 and network audio. The data are the same in both cases, and the reclocking of those data when fed to the processor’s DAC chips should be identical. And if the reclocking isn’t identical, the timing accuracy should favor the network connection, where the clock doesn’t have to be extracted from the datastream, as it does with AES3. In any case, for the reasons stated above, I always keep my ears open when I try new streaming D/A processors, like the one under review here, the $10,000 Lumin P1 from Hong Kong–based Pixel Magic Systems.

The P1

The elegant-looking P1 offers a complete set of digital inputs—AES3, S/PDIF (coaxial and TosLink), plus USB and Ethernet (electrical and optical) with full MQA decoding—adding to that balanced and unbalanced analog inputs, one HDMI 2.0 input, and three ARC-enabled HDMI 2.0 outputs with 4K video passthrough. The