Just wondered if anyone had heard Arcam's new-ish big DAC?

On the face of it, it seems to do what I want - digital electrical (for the squeezebox), optical (for the TV) and AES (for the Ikemi) inputs, and balanced outputs (to save me having to buy yet more expensive cables, as I would with (say) a Naim DAC), and with some inputs left over to handle the BD player if it sounds better than way (rather than via HDMI to TV media box and optical from there). I even found a comment on the "What Hifi" website from a contributor who's plugged it into the back of his Ikemi and loved it, which certainly caught my attention, even if I take What Hifi about as seriously as the Daily Mail...

The reviews I've seen make it sound good. KH in HFN seems to say that ultimately it might be a bit polite, and I'm quite hot on timing, so that may be a factor. On the other hand, KH probably wasn't running it off filtered mains, which is a factor in many reviews...

But anyway, if I have a sudden rush of blood to the head, do y'all reckon it's worth trying to track down a demo unit (ironic, as I live only a few miles up the road from Arcam...)?

Oh, jolly good! Any idea when that issue is due out...?

My feeling is that with this DAC - or indeed with any DACs that allow poor stop-band performance in return for less ringing - there's never going to be an alternative to trying it for oneself, because one can have little idea how the rest of the system is going to react to out-of-band spurii...

Anyway, looking forward to seeing what you say....

Thank you. Don't know if I am or not, to be honest. Until I've heard what a modern £2k DAC can do in my own system, I won't know if it's worth it to me or not. Have just had a word with my local dealer, he's very enthusiastic about the way it sounds, and is going to try to get hold of one for me to loan...

Well, it's here. It was in Arcam's office this morning, on my dealer's sofa at lunchtime, and now it's on my shelf :-).

I won't write too much about first impressions, as I see that Google has found this thread, so I'd probably be doing Arcam a gross dis-service if I commented too much on the sound of a brand spanking new (and stone cold) unit. Suffice to say that the body's nice, but the timing needs to improve. I'll leave it hooked up over spdif to the squeezebox for a few days, playing random shuffle 24/7. And then we'll start to see.

From the posts I assume that its price is in the 2000 pound range; that would put it up against the new 8 chip a side Metrum if accounts on another forum are accurate. Nothing on the web site yet about it; anyone have any info on it? May be just the thing for some of my friends who think the Octave is too cheap to consider.

Spot on

I wasn't necessarily looking to spend - OK, I'll rephrase that, I'm a Yorkshireman, a part of England notorious for short arms and long pockets - I certainly wasn't looking to spend £2k. And, I hasten to add, I still haven't spent it, this is a dem :-).

But I have numerous digital sources, and I want to be able to hook them up. Very few people seem to be designing DACs with that sort of "hub" functionality, everyone's just doing a one-in, one-out sort of thing. Oh, and I wanted balanced outputs, otherwise I'd be spending an additional shedload on a new set of interconnect cables (I have balanced VdH carbon cables), so those new cables would have to be factored into the price of a new single-ended DAC, if I buy one.

Rambling off topic: What we've found, in particular, is that the Squeezebox in a few short weeks has completely transformed the way that we're "using" music in day-to-day life - whereas before-SB it was necessary to exert mental effort to work out what we might like to play, whether there's gonna be any tracks on the album we're not gonna like, etc, which generally resulted in our not playing anything at all for casual background, we now just stick it on random shuffle and let it get on with it, no thought required. If a track comes up that we don't like, then either find the remote (or my wife's iPhone!) and skip it, or just grin and bear it, something else'll be along in 3 minutes. The SB now has about 5k tracks to go at (that was tedious!) and we're rediscovering music that we'd entirely forgotten that we had. It's been brilliant, but I just want it to sound a bit better :-)

Shame we can't do the same thing for the vinyl, really; there's huge amounts of music there that we liked once and that we never listen to...


PS: Just turned the volume up for a few minutes and caught it playing Blue Rodeo's Dark Angel, a duet between Blue Rodeo's (male) lead singer and the estimable Sarah McLachlan. Slow and deep and dark and velvety and textured and, above all, (for some reason this word came into my head) chocolate-y. Very nice. So there's definite signs of promise....

Our experience with the Arcam D33 is that it takes quite some time to run in, and that the main gains are in the timing stakes. It sounds more together after some running in ('some' = 'a good few days').

The timing errors may cancel out on average..

Cynics! I know what I mean :-). Whatever aspect it is of the device's performance that affects its ability to portray the timing - the finger-clicking element - of the music.

24 hours in and it's much improved. It had a good slinky canter though KT Tunstall's Black Horse/Cherry Tree, and barnstormed its way through the last 3 tracks on Springsteen's Live In Dublin album - Saints Go March, This Little Light and American Land. Mind you, I challenge any piece of kit to play those and get them wrong :-). And this is all being fed at 16/44 from the Squeezebox Touch. My wife commented that she's hearing details in songs that she's never heard before - I know it's a tired cliche, but we have looked at each other once or twice and said "Eh? Where did that come from?".

Pulp's Common People - surely a candidate for worst-mastered track of all time - was at least intelligible; ditto Robbie Williams' Feel, though sounding a trifle subdued...

Anyway, the hours continue to mount...

Ashley - yes, having looked at your video, I can see that Blue Rodeo and Blue Rondo aren't quite the same thing!!! I didn't realise that Blue Rodeo are still going; it's odd, I really like the album that we have, it conjures great personal memories of an evening in the Canadian Rockies for us, and yet the experience of it seems complete in and of itself, it's a little nugget of perfection, and I have no desire to go out and buy any more. I'm not a country fan, but, for some reason, that album just works for me. It's called "Five Days in July", a reference (I think) to the recording process, and is a real little gem. The last 3 tracks - Dark Angel, Know Where You Go, Tell Me Your Dream - are as perfect a way of ending an slightly melancholy album as I've ever heard, the absolute opposite of the "big finish". Having Sarah McLachlan on board, on vocals and piano, for those three tracks probably helps, too.

Rip it :) To 24/192 if you like.

I wonder if there could be a viable business renting out a good quality turntable, cartridge, phono stage and ADC to people? Or maybe having a central facility where people could ship their vinyl to be ripped before being shipped back...

Hmmm.