Audio Research i/50

@roxy54 never make a typo? I bow to your pedanticism. 

My local brick-and-mortar ARC retailer has one on demo with a phono. Paired with efficient speakers, they are big fans, and big fans of ARC in general. I am told that i/50s are very popular.

The last 3 times I visited, with no other customers in the space, they were playing it for their own enjoyment. They have lots of other options, and they choose to listen to the i/50.

I listened casually and it was very pleasant. I too am a big ARC fan, but I'm not in the market for an integrated, so I didn't listen critically.

If I were in the market for an integrated, an i/50 would be at the top of my list.

I should have mentioned in my previous post that I own an ARC Ref 6SE, and that I toured the ARC factory last summer (I live nearby). The i/50s are built by the same folks in the same building as everything else. They were building a lot of them, palettes and palettes marked for shipping all over the world. They even have their own paint booth for them in-house (cerakote I believe). They sweat the details at ARC, the i/50 is no exception.

I've had a good deal of MacIntosh gear (although never a 252). Good quality stuff, looks great (which is of course in the eye of the beholder), sounds good. It's real magic is resale; buy it right and you can use it for a year and sell it for the same as you paid or even more.

Can say many of the same things for ARC. Good quality stuff, looks great, resale is good (although not as good as Mac gear). It does however, sound better. Much better, at least to my ears. YMMV

The point of all of this is to enjoy the journey.

An onboard DAC will make at least part of your Lumin potentially redundant. I guess I'd wait to see if you prefer the sound of the onboard DAC before moving on from your Lumin.