Lumin U2 Mini

Network Audio
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I bit the bullet and bought a Lumin U2 Mini for my system. I have a PerfectWave DAC and I’m feeding it with coaxial input. The stream seems to work fine, my issue is with the Lumin app you have to use to control it.

I’m 75 so I’m not really good with iPhones or iPads (very bad eyesight) so I picked up a M1 MacMini to replace my aging 2012 MacMini. I feed the Perfect wave with USB from the old MacMini and everything works fine; I just wanted to see if the Lumin would give me a little more.
I’m using an external drive on the M! MacMinito give me room for the thousands of tracks I have on file. Up until now I’ve used Swinsian to control the music, it works well with any music format I’ve tried from mp3’s to hires 24 bit files.

The M1 recognizes and runs the Lumin app fine, the problem is that app is about as obtuse as anything I’ve seen in decades. It wants nothing to do with the 10,000 files on my disk, it will connect to Qobuz or Tidal fine but the interface for that is balky at best. Lumin suggests I use MinimServer as a DLNA server so I downloaded and tried to ue that. It seems that requires JAVA but the M1 and Monterey want nothing to do with JAVA. Funny how a $25 piece of software runs circles around the Lunin and it’s control software ($2400).\

I’ve requested a RMA to send the LUMIN back.

2

you don’t have to use the lumin app.

try a Roon trial subscription. Should work great with it.

roonlabs.com

no financial interest in roon, just a user, and one very close to biting the bullet on a Lumin U2 Mini

1 Like
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Just in case. you did not see this in the MinimServer website:

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image1706×399 103 KB

Best of lucks.

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i could not get Java to install on my Mac Mini M1 so I gave up on Minim server for now. Talking to Apple tech support on other issues I get the feeling they are still in the deep end when it comes to non ARM software on the M1 chipset. The hardware on the Lumin appears fine but I can’t hear any improvement over having the M1 computer feed the PerfectWave DAC over USB so the LUMIN has been sent back - that cost me $125 to ship back but I’m still getting $2250 back and that will pay for a lot of music.

I did configure a Minis Forum i5 (16GB ram with 256G boot stick and 350G music storage) as a Roon Rock and that seems to work just fine - Those tiny computers are very quiet so a good fit for a music server, I also signed up for a year of ROON, so now I can use ROON to dish up my files (8k and counting) as well as Quobuz. I’m still getting used to the interface, I’d prefer a simple text based database listing of music but I’ll get used to all the folderol over time