We are a major Lumin dealer and have had extensive experience with DCS in the past, in fact Wilgolf is one of our clients.
The battle between DCS and Lumin can be summed up with DCS tends to favor resolution over musicality, not saying the DCS is harsh, but there is a distinctly clean uncolored but not harsh presentation to the DCS while the Lumin tends to be a very dimensional, and very engaging sound also with excellent resolution.
We had a client many years ago trade in a DCS Rossini for a Lumin A1 which he found to offer a more relaxed presentation while still offering much of the clarity of the DCS.
Lumin's products are also a technological tour de force, Lumin is a division of Pixel magic a large Taiwanese manufacturer of broadcast video products. There engineering dept has the resources of a very large high end company.
Spinaker the Lumin X1 also uses a FPGA as well, the reality is a FPGA really doesn't mean much, most of these companies use mature filtering techniques and don't need to come up with magic software upgrades every few months, the advantage of an FPGA is that you can add and improve features easily through firmware,
The Lundhal transformers are really magical and do help the X1 with its liquid sounding midrange.
Very few people will walk away from the X1 to hear one is to fall in love with one.
The X1 has a huge three dimensional sound stage, good top and bottom extension, excellent resolution and air, a warm full bodied midrange and a great feature set, MQA, Roon endpoint, a great app, easy software upgrades, optical isolation
We sell some of the world's best digital products from Aqua, Light Harmonic, T+A, Naim, Innous, and a few others.
The summation is that the X1 can only be bettered by spending a lot more money,
Tomic the X1 is a far better deal than the Naim and in most ways far outperforms the Naim for way less.
Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ Lumin dealers
