ARCAM: The Standard of British Sound

ARCAM is Britain’s foremost specialist audio-visual manufacturer, founded in Cambridge in 1972. With a broad lineup centred on integrated amplifiers and CD players spanning the entry to mid-range, the company has established an unshakeable position in the consumer Hi-Fi market in its home country — to the extent that one in every two CD players sold in Britain is said to be an ARCAM. In Japan too, the price gap with the UK narrowed considerably after major audio manufacturer DENON (Denon Lab) took on the import agency some years ago, and in recent years ARCAM products have begun to appear occasionally on the shop floor of consumer electronics retailers. ※ Denon Lab withdrew from its import agency duties for ARCAM and Infinity in 2008.

What makes ARCAM products so appealing is, above all else, how little they assert themselves as pieces of audio equipment. Simple, modern styling that blends smoothly into a room as if it were a piece of furniture; an ease of use that anyone can get on with comfortably; a price point that holds its own against Japanese-made equipment — and yet, far from being a mini system, the sound quality carries a convincing sense of proper hi-fi, backed by a musicality that speaks of genuinely refined sensibility. That all of this holds together at such a high level is what makes ARCAM so compelling.

The current ARCAM design, based around white silver, has as its hallmark a plain, unfussy sound quality free of any audio-flavoured contrivance. Rather than colouring the recorded information on each CD with the kind of personal bias or opinionated character that tends to creep into so many hi-fi components, ARCAM draws out that information naturally, as it actually is. As a consequence, in purely sonic terms it is not the type of component that makes a point of emphasising wide frequency extension or high information retrieval — resolution, presence, power handling, dynamic range: everything settles at a sensible middle ground. Listened to in a close, forensic, audiophile manner — microscope pressed to the speaker grille, so to speak — one might come away feeling slightly unsatisfied.

The thinness and lightness of the casework does tend to reinforce what is overall a somewhat lightweight, mild, and understated tonal character (this tendency becomes more pronounced as you move down into the lower-priced models), and it is interesting to note that this is diametrically opposed — 180 degrees different — from the Japanese-flavoured, wide-range, and weighty sound of DENON products, the very company that serves as ARCAM’s importer. And yet, the way the soundstage opens up — gently and generously, without any sense of imposition — along with the easy, fatigue-free quality that allows hours of listening without discomfort, and the natural sense of balance with which the information encoded on a CD is drawn out, neither too much nor too little: when you think of all this not from the perspective of an audiophile but as a music lover looking for a playback machine, there is in truth a depth and generosity to ARCAM that makes you wonder whether you could possibly need anything more.

Phrased this way, one might be left with the mistaken impression that ARCAM’s sound quality is somehow poor. That would be quite wrong. Choosing not to emphasise hi-fi qualities for their own sake does not equal low sound quality. Because ARCAM has extended its lineup down to the entry level so that as many people as possible can enjoy quality sound reproduction, it tends to be compared unfavourably against higher-tier models from competing manufacturers — but if you turn your attention to the FMJ Series, ARCAM’s true reference line, you find that it actually ranks among the very best in the mid-range British miniature-system category. The contemporary sense of reproduction and spacious soundstaging of the FMJ Series stands comparison with my own TAG McLaren F3 60i — the quality is at least equal, and I would say the two make worthy rivals of each other.

The FMJ CD23T, predecessor to the current CD player the FMJ CD33T, is a particularly notable machine — it incorporates a 24-bit Ring DAC co-developed with the renowned British high-end company dCS, and its musically rich, warm tonal character has earned it an enduring following among music lovers who understand the qualities of British-made equipment. (Addendum, January 2008: The latest successor model is the FMJ-CD36T, which uses a Wolfson WM8740 rather than a dCS chip.)

ARCAM does not spoil the joy and expressiveness that music carries. Rather than exaggerating the sound and drawing the listener’s ear towards the equipment’s “sonic character,” its strength lies in an honest, genuine quality that draws the listener, almost without their noticing, into the music itself. In that sense, it is faithful to the idea that a hi-fi component should remain, first and last, a tool for music reproduction — which is what a playback device ought to be. The sense I get is that ARCAM’s policy as a manufacturer is to put high-quality, living, musically unspoilt playback machines into the hands not merely of audiophiles with particular tastes, but of music lovers the world over, as broadly as possible. So this is not a brand I would recommend from a purely audiophile angle — “how does it sound?”, “what’s it like from a hi-fi standpoint?”, or fussing over audio cables and Hi-Fi accessories — but rather one I would point towards people with a refined, cultivated sense of values who seek genuine principle and aesthetic in their way of living. That is ARCAM.

This is the ARCAM SOLO, a new all-in-one amplifier-tuner-CDP receiver available in the UK at £1,000 — I do wonder whether Denon Lab has any plans to release it in Japan? Something around the ¥200,000 mark would seem about right. The tuner board could surely be converted to Japanese spec quite easily if it went through Denon. There must be plenty of people out there who would love to compare it against something like the LINN CLASSIK MUSIC. (Addendum, January 2008: It was released in Japan without any fuss!) I had a chance to audition the ARCAM SOLO in a shop, and it has the same clean, colourless, and quietly well-mannered sound that characterises recent ARCAM — the kind where the soundstage opens up softly and naturally. As an all-in-one system there are perhaps slight concerns about the amplifier’s drive capability, but rather than pairing it with an awkward or characterful speaker, it is better suited to being enjoyed at moderate volume levels with an efficient, even-tempered speaker. The SOLO, true to ARCAM form, adds no strange flavouring to the music, and it is a product I would happily recommend to music lovers at large.

As an aside, my first encounter with an ARCAM product goes back some ten years. It was a CD player called the Alpha 5 Plus (α5 Plus), which featured the hybrid multi-bit/one-bit D/A converter that ARCAM was so committed to at the time, along with the PHILIPS die-cast swing-arm mechanism, the CDM9. The sound of ARCAM in that era was entirely different in character from the ARCAM of today — full of energy, with a vividly clear image, and frankly a touch coarse; it would not have been too much of an exaggeration to say it existed solely for the live reproduction of British rock. For me, primarily a classical listener, it was honestly more than I could handle. Conversely, I imagine that for anyone who took to the α5 Plus’s sound, it was a CD player of a realism and presence that could never be substituted by anything else. ARCAM’s tonal character has changed dramatically with each new design generation — through the 1980s, the 1990s, and into the 2000s — and when I think back to how it sounded then, the way today’s ARCAM appeals to virtually everyone with so little in the way of distinguishing personality feels like quite a transformation.

[PR] Search for ARCAM products ⇒ 【Yahoo! Shopping】【Amazon.co.jp】