ARCAM CDS50 SACD/CD/NETWORK STREAMING PLAYER

Many audiophiles are ‘rusted on’ followers of Arcam, having been fans of this British brand since its humble beginnings back in 1976, when it started life in Cambridgeshire, England, as ‘Amplification & Recording Cambridge’ a name that was soon after sensibly abbreviated to Arcam. However, following Samsung’s purchase of Arcam (adding to a high-end hi-fi portfolio that now includes JBL, Lexicon, Revel and Mark Levinson) I suspect that many of those rusted-on followers were waiting with bated breath to see what the first new range to be released under new ownership looked like. As you can see, it’s basically ‘same same’—as in that nothing has really changed. All three components in Arcam’s new HDA (High Definition Audio) line are typically ‘Arcam’ in terms of appearance, finish and build quality, those three being the SA10, SA20 and the CDS50 reviewed here. And the performance? Is that the same? That’s what you’re about to discover…

THE EQUIPMENT

When you’re building a component that must necessarily convert digital signals to analogue signals, it makes good practical sense (and excellent commercial sense) to make sure that it can convert as many different types of digital signals to analogue as possible. Thus it is that the new Arcam CDS50 can not only play digital music stored on commercial optical discs (CD and SACD) as well as digital music stored on CD-R and CD-RW (in FLAC, WAV, AAC, AIFF, OGG, MP3 or WMA formats), but it can also play back music files you have stored on USB, on a hard drive, on your home computer network, or streamed through your network from the Internet (via Ethernet or 802.11g/b/n wireless).

There is no Bluetooth connection, and I must admit to being a tad surprised by this. Sure, there would have been additional manufacturing costs and licensing fees