ARCAM CDS50
SACD/CD/network player
A CD player? In this day and age? Judge ye not so swiftly! — the combination of disc player and network source proves a powerful one.
It’s a what? A CD player?? Since the revival of vinyl, CD has to be the format of least renown for the younger generation of streaming Bluetooth-connected listeners, who will be focused on our group tests of headphones and wireless speakers this issue. We could try to explain that back in the 1980s we couldn’t stream anything, because there wasn’t anywhere to stream it from, and high-quality music took up more space than our floppy disks could possibly handle, so instead we had to burn holes in a layer of silver and then read them back with a laser, and pretty neat we thought it too. But they’d just look at us strangely.
Yet the CD player delivers CD-quality music (oddly enough), better than Bluetooth, better than Spotify. And besides, the new Arcam CDS50 can play not only digital music stored on CD, but also SACD (where that new-fangled DSD format originated, thank you very much), as well as digital music stored on CD-R and CD-RW in FLAC, WAV, AAC, AIFF, OGG, MP3 or WMA formats. And in case you wish to use an external converter, the CDS50 also provides S/PDIF and optical digital outputs. And it can 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).
So now we’re talking.
Equipment
Equally importantly, this is an Arcam disc player, a longstanding UK company now under the Harman umbrella (so ultimately owned, in fact, by Samsung). 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’. This is the part of the
HDA range, the first since the Harman purchase, so many of those rusted-on followers were waiting with bated breath to see what the first new range under new ownership would look like.
As you can see, it’s basically ‘same same’ — nothing’s changed dramatically. All three components in Arcam’s new HDA (High Definition Audio) line are typically ‘Arcam’ in terms of appearance, finish and build quality. The other two are amplifiers — the SA10 and SA20. This CDS50 could go with either of them, or indeed with any other amplifier; it has balanced outputs as well as unbalanced, and curiously neither amplifier has balanced inputs to link with those. So this is clearly designed for other equipment as well as its own range, although the provided remote will control compatible Arcam integrated amps for volume (including mute on/off), balance, and input selection. It’s a real, honest-to-goodness, multi-function remote.
There is no Bluetooth connection; we admit to being a tad surprised by this. Sure, there would have been additional manufacturing costs and licensing fees involved in providing Bluetooth, but it would have made the CDS50 an even more attractive purchase proposition than it already is. (For the record, it doesn’t have AirPlay either.)
Performance
The first thing you notice when the disc drawer opens is that the tray is made of plastic, rather than of some more robust material, but this is to be expected at the price Arcam is asking for the CDS50. Press ‘Play’ (either using the front panel transport controls, or those on the remote or the app) and you’ll find that the music starts quickly enough, though if you elect to skip forward a few tracks to start deeper into a disc, things can slow up a little. There didn’t appear to be a track
buffer, so you can’t just press the button multiple times and have it skip the requisite number of tracks: it’s instead a kind of ‘push and wait’… ‘push and wait’ process. To avoid this, simply use the direct track access controls on the remote instead, where pushing ‘2’ followed by ‘7’ will have the laser sledding immediately to track 27, with no delay at all.
As for the operation of the remote, we found it was really smooth, with the added bonus that while you’re using it, all the buttons are illuminated with a soft glow, which looks good no matter what the ambient light conditions, and certainly helps if you’ve turned the room lighting down low for ambience. The front-panel display has three brightness settings: ‘Off’, ‘Dim’, and ‘Bright’. Indeed the remote has two brightness buttons — one for the CDS50’s display and one for the display of an Arcam amp, so you can adjust them individually.
When you do start playing your intended track, you’re going to be impressed, because the Arcam CDS50’s performance with ordinary CDs was exceptionally good. Indeed after several weeks we’d formed the impression that the sound of CDs played in the CDS50 was actually superior to what we heard when playing SACDs. There wasn’t a lot in it, mind you, but we found the CD sound definitely more to our liking. Listening to the GN Records hybrid version of ‘Belafonte at Carnegie Hall’, for example, which is a dual-layer disc of exactly the same mix with one layer recorded in SACD and the other in CD (and not to be confused with the rather horrible-sounding CD-only version produced by RCA in 1990), we found Belafonte’s voice altogether more charismatic on CD… we seemed to get a better feel for the warmth of his interpretations. Oddly enough the high frequencies also seemed a little cleaner on the CD layer than the SACD layer. Perhaps the most disconcerting part of our observations was that the SACD sound from the CDS50 was as good as the SACD sound we’ve heard from any other SACD player… so it’s not that the SACD is inferior, but more that Arcam has really excelled itself in optimising the sound from good old compact discs.
Listening to a straight CD (Big White’s debut album, ‘Teenage Dreams’), the echoladen jangly guitars that kick off the opener, Bell Towers, are delivered with a superb lightness and a gloriously textured sustained sound. The kick drum sound is impressively solid, and the bass guitar sound is depthy and tuneful, providing a perfect underpinning for the band. The Arcam’s ability at the other end of the spectrum is demonstrated on Tuesday, where the delicate sound of the tapped cymbals contrasts beautifully with the fluid high frequencies (and associated harmonics) of Anna McDonald’s violin. Listen especially to the close-out to this track, which dies away quietly and brilliantly smoothly to perfect silence.
Perhaps one of the best demonstrations of the Arcam CDS50’s ability to be revealing of the music you play using it is the sound of I Can’t Tell, which is the only track on ‘Teenage Dreams’ that was not recorded at Damien Gerard Studios in Sydney (having been recorded in Berlin at Paul Lincke Studios). At the risk of making a bad pun, you certainly can tell — at least you can when listening to it using the Arcam CDS50 — that this track is the ‘odd man out’ on this CD. The cymbals are not as shimmery as on the other tracks and the sound of the kick drum not nearly so well-defined… to name just two of the most obvious differences. You Don’t Get Much is another track that’s revealing of the CDS50’s superior performance, because rather than the sound coming straight out of digital black, Big White has decided to record several seconds of studio ‘noise’ (though ‘lack of noise’ would be a better descriptor) before the strummed acoustic guitar introduces the vocal, which allowed us to hear how beautifully the Arcam CDS50 handles super-low-level noise, without introducing any digital artefacts or extraneous sounds, along with a complete lack of any dither or jitter effects. Excellent performance.
The sound of the Arcam was equally good when reproducing digital signals supplied to it ‘via the ether’ or hardwired to the digital inputs, and all bit-rates and file types were handled with equal aplomb, though every now and then the Arcam’s front-panel display would display ‘No Signal’ during playback, which was obviously incorrect, so there was obviously some type of programming bug in our review player. The display also showed ‘44.1kHz’ even when playing tracks with higher sampling rates. We expect both issues will have been sorted by the time you’re reading this review.
However, it’s the quality of the sound that’s important, and we found that no matter whether we were playing music at 16-bit/44.kHz or at higher resolutions, the Arcam CDS50 sounded unfailingly smooth and sweet, with superb dynamics and incredible frequency extension. The quietness of the backgrounds was a stand-out, as was the total lack of distortion… particularly at very low recorded levels.
Conclusion
So guffaw not at the release of a new CD player — the CDS50 absolutely nails that core ability, but it is also far more than that. Old-school or new-school, the new Arcam CDS50 does it all bar Bluetooth and computer USB… and it does what it does easily and gracefully, while also delivering supremely good sound. Jack Martial