British Text Appeal
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday February 9, 2004
Britain is packed with hi-fi manufacturers so famous they have become household names around the world - Quad, B&W, KEF, Tannoy and Linn. Some have the advantage of royal patronage; others have been greatly assisted by the BBC's research unit. Arcam is Britain's most successful hi-fi manufacturer, thanks partly to help from Cambridge University, with which it has had links since 1972. The company's first product, the A60 amplifier, was largely designed and tested at the university. Arcam intended to make only 50 units, but demand forced it to expand production. Ultimately, it sold 30,000 of them. Today, the A60 is regarded as a collectable classic.
Arcam describes its new CD73 as being the successor to its famous CD72. This description, when combined with the similarity in model numbers, is deceptive because the CD73 is a completely updated design that has little in common with the earlier model. The CD72 used a rather old-fashioned Burr-Brown digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The CD73 has the latest generation Wolfson 24-bit DAC mounted on a removable, double-sided, through-hole-plated printed circuit board (PCB).
The PCB is removable because the CD73 can be upgraded. Swap the PCB for one with two Wolfson 24-bit/192kHz DACs and the performance approaches that of Arcam's CD82. Change it for one with four Wolfson DACs operating in a dual-differential mode and you've effectively built yourself Arcam's topline Diva CD93.
Switch the Arcam on and the front-panel display springs into life with a garish green glow. Letters and numbers are very sharply defined, so it's easy to read the display from across the room, but we suspect most CD73 owners will make regular use of the "Display Off" button on the remote. This remarkable clarity is necessary because the player can display CD-Text. Load a CD containing CD-Text data and the display shows the album title rather than the usual track number display. During playback, the display shows the name of each track as it's played. Sony Music is one of the few companies that includes text on its releases, even though 400 labels are licensed to do so. There are no official figures on the number of CDs available that contain text, but industry insiders estimate there are several thousand on sale.
All advanced player functions, including shuffle, repeat modes (disc/track/A-B) and track programming, can be activated by the remote control. It's lightweight and easy to handle. If you connect the CD73 to an Arcam amplifier, the same remote will adjust speaker volume and switch between different input sources.
Sound quality is excellent. There's no trace of background noise when playing CDs, so it's easy to hear low-level musical details you'd miss with ordinary CD players. When a single sustained note decays into silence, its tone quality remains pure until the moment it vanishes, rather than assuming a buzzy character just before the end. British hi-fi magazine What Hi-Fi? voted Arcam's CD73 the best CD player of 2003.
info file
Arcam CD73 Text-CD Player
RRP: $1298
Absolute Audio Vision Pty Ltd
Unit 3, 177 Arthur Street, Homebush, NSW 2140
9764 5092
sales@absoluteaudiovision.com.au
www.arcam.co.uk (manufacturer site)
© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald