ROB WAUGH GADGET OF THE WEEK
This being Arcam, of course (a posh British brand which has held its own against Japanese cinemasound brands for years) they’ve gone absolutely hog wild ensuring that two speakers perform better than five. The massive, sturdy aluminium speaker bar has a 200W amplifier built in, and pairs with a 300W subwoofer which can demolish your home if you raise the volume too quickly.
For the family’s ‘big’ TV, this is a soundbar built to outlast your flatscreen. It’s seriously mus- cular, but built to fade into the background – well, as much as a five-foot metal draught excluder can. It even tunes into most TV remotes to work seamlessly with the volume and on/off buttons.
It has four HDMI slots in the back, so you can plug in everything from TV boxes to games consoles – and make anything from Call Of Duty to Bake Off ring out with a volume that sounds like the first trumpet blast at the battle of Armageddon.
Arcam’s years of prowess in making home cinema receivers shines through here. This can decode the posh surround sound formats most people never use on their Blu-ray player (such as Dolby DTS) but it doesn’t turn TV channels into sonic sludge.
Music sounds superb through it (you can stream direct from tablets and phones via CD-quality Bluetooth aptX). Testing it with a Blu-ray of the Tom Cruise atrocity Oblivion, you could suddenly hear the dialogue in between the fighting. This, sadly, offered a pretty good insight into why most surround system makers have long felt confident that no one would mind if they blotted out the words…