Pre/Power Amplifiers

Izumi Saito, European Sales Manager, who visitors to Luxman's room at past Hi-Fi Show Lives will undoubtedly recognise, provided us with a glimpse of what has inspired this re-imagining of the NeoClassico series, debuted at Axpona 2019.

'While Luxman is known for its full-size tube and solid-state audio components, built for serious audiophiles, the NeoClassico products were born from a desire to attract new customers to the wonderful world of music reproduced using vacuum tubes.

'The original NeoClassico series, launched in 2007, was produced in limited quantity but ever since our customers have asked us to bring back something compact, simple and stylish. However, we have no current plans to expand the NeoClassico series beyond the latest SQ-N150 and D-N150.'

Low power aside, the SQ-N150 tube amplifier is notable for its very low noise and wide S/N ratio. Was this an intentional feature of the design?

'We are proud of that! It was certainly a design goal and achieved, in part, by lowering the gain of the power amp stage [to +9dB] and increasing the gain of the preamp stage [to +24dB]. Negative feedback is just 16dB overall but our ECC83-based preamp and phase-splitter offers excellent linearity while the pentode connection boosts the gain. The choice of EL84 pentodes, configured for ultralinear push-pull operation, and custom output transformer are also key to the SQ-N150's low noise.'