I’ve been to a few bowling parties and passed a bottle around a few fire pits, but I’ve never watched an audiophile unboxing video. Lately though, I have been paying closer attention to my first impressions of each new audio product as it enters my realm.
I’m finding it interesting to notice how a device previously unseen and unheard declares itself one small step at a time as I open its box, feel its heft, observe its form, study its manual, and, finally, wire it into my system. Those start-up experiences, plus my gut feelings during my first moments of music listening, establish a tone of innocent discovery I wish would last the whole month. It never does.
I mention this because my first impressions for my first-ever review of an ARCAM product, the Radia A25 integrated amplifier, were in that “innocent and receptive” mode from the instant I saw the box sitting outside my door. The 26.5lb box looked Jimmy Stewart–trim and reasonably sized (8" × 23" × 17"), and it was easy to lift. My first impression was that ARCAM had their box and packing game together.
The first tell was the brown paper tape, which, with three quick box-cutter cuts, revealed an inner “tuck top” box with a giant letter “A” printed on its cover, formed from thin black lines suggesting piano keys. This tuck-topped box opened to reveal a brown, cast-paper eggcrate-type spacer with a small brown cardboard box nested in its center. That small box contained a sharp-looking (plastic) remote and an IEC power cord. The A25’s nine-language quick-start guide was in a brown paper envelope affixed with brown tape to the inside of the top cover. The A25 itself was sheathed in a white paper-cloth bag.
This was my first-ever encounter with smartly engineered, artfully executed, 100% biodegradable packaging, and it felt like a sincere handshake.
ARCAM
Back in the day, in Great Britain, Amplification & Recording Cambridge Ltd., t/a ARCAM, made slim-profiled integrated amplifiers reputed to work well with England’s most popular speaker: the Wharfedale Diamond shelf-mount. That’s all I knew about ARCAM before I started writing this report.1
ARCAM’s website says “The ‘A’ in ARCAM stands for Amplification—this is our core competence. The A25 is the latest in more than 45 years of amplifier design and manufacture, going back to our first product in 1976—the A&R Cambridge A60 amplifier.”
Description
ARCAM’s flagship Radia A25 is a slender, nicely sculpted, matte-black, 19.8lb integrated amplifier that operates in class-G and is specified to output 100W into 8 ohms and 165W into 4 ohms.
The A25 is designed in Cambridge, UK, and built in China. Its back panel features stereo pairs of loudspeaker binding posts plus three unbalanced RCA inputs and one RCA input for a moving magnet phono cartridge. There are also four digital inputs: two coaxial, one optical, and one USB-C. The A25’s DAC uses an ESS Sabre ES9280A Pro DAC chip, which allows a choice of three reconstruction filters and supports PCM sampling rates up to 384kHz and DSD up to DSD1024. There is also a variable (volume-controlled) pre-out on RCA, 12V triggers In and Out (also on
