Arcam CD25 Review

Design

• One finish option
• OLED display

Restrained is as good as any word to describe the design of the Arcam CD25. The bulk of the chassis is slightly textured metal finished in black – which is your only colour option – with some yellow accents to tie the design to the rest of Arcam’s Radia series of products.

The front panel is mostly of glass, and features a crisp, bright and easily legible OLED display. The few physical controls (power on/off, play/pause, skip forwards, skip backwards, stop, and open/close disc tray) are nicely integrated, and there’s a little yellow circle surrounding the power button. There are also yellow highlights on the feet, where no one will ever see them.

The standard of build and finish is really good in every respect. The disc tray slides smoothly and silently, and the machine is, to all intents and purposes, silent as it reads the disc’s contents.

The appearance of a cowl over the rear panel is just as pointless and unwelcome here as it is on every other piece of Radia electronics – it increases the depth of the machine for no good reason, and makes accessing the socketry on the rear panel more difficult than it otherwise would be. As a design flourish it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me.

Features

• Dual ESS Sabre ES9039Q2M DACs
• Balanced and unbalanced analogue outputs
• Linear toroidal power supply

The CD25 doesn’t have a whole lot of features – it’s just a compact disc player, after all. But the features it has are all entirely fit for purpose.

On the inside, the CD25 is fitted with twin ESS Sabre ES9039Q2M DAC chipsets with the company’s reference voltage regulators. Each DAC processes one channel in balanced mode completely independently of the other, the point of which is to offer superior channel separation and low noise.

The disc mechanism itself is mounted on a vibration-damping chassis in an effort to deliver accurate and stable signal retrieval. An oversized linear toroidal power supply delivers clean, low-noise DC power.

On the rear panel, slightly less accessible than they otherwise would be thanks to that cowl, there are balanced and unbalanced outputs on XLR and RCA connections respectively. There are also coaxial and optical digital outputs, in case the signal needs to be kept in the digital domain so it can be attended to by a DAC even more capable than that fitted to the player.

At the front, the disc-loading mechanism is quite leisurely in its responses – but this does at least give you time to investigate the five digital filter options accessible in the on-screen menus using the remote control handset.

Your options are Linear Slow, Linear Fast, Min Slow, Min Fast, and Apodizing [sic]. I think it’s safe to say the audio differences between each filter are quite subtle – I end up conducting most of my testing using Min Fast, which strikes me as the most neutral and least sonically colourful of the options.

Performance

• Clarity, detail and dynamism to spare
• Combines punchy authority with remarkable insight
• Deftly naturalistic tonality

Yes, £1499 is quite a lot of money to be spending on a compact disc player. But if you have a system that can do some justice to the CD25 once it’s slotted into place, the sound the Arcam makes justifies the outlay all day long.

There’s really no area in which it’s not impressive and quite a few in which it’s uncomplicatedly excellent. A CD of Universal Sounds of America, a collection of quite outré jazz that includes the particularly unhinged Thème de Yoyo by Art Ensemble of Chicago, allows the CD25 to showcase quite a few of its numerous attributes – not least the ability to bring some order to bear.

This is a recording that revels in its unruliness and chaos, and the Arcam never tries to neuter its energy – but it maintains control and grip, and demonstrates its authority, in every respect. The result is a coherent and confident reading of a recording that can sound like a mess (or worse) in less capable hands.

There’s such clarity to the sound of the CD25, such attention to detail and such a remarkable degree of insight that the inner workings of every element of the recording are made apparent.

Everything that occurs takes place in front of a dark, quiet backdrop, and the work the Arcam does with low-level dynamic variations in harmonics means there’s real energy and animation to the sound. The broader dynamics of volume and intensity are expressed in full, too – especially during those moments when the band seems to have all fallen down the same lift-shaft at the same time.

Switch to the altogether calmer, but no less testing, sound of A Tribe Called Quest’s Go Ahead in the Rain and the good news keeps on coming. There’s a lovely neutrality to the tonality of the CD25, an unwillingness to stick its oar in too overtly – and so the combination of analogue instruments and digital machines (plus peerless mic technique, of course) sounds as natural as can be.

Low frequencies are solidly punchy but also beautifully controlled, so rhythmic expression is confident – and the direct, unequivocal nature of the insight that’s on offer here allows you to see the join in all the cut-and-shut elements of the recording without sacrificing anything by way of unity or timing.

In fact, direct is a decent way of describing the CD25’s overall attitude. It can analyse a recording and put every scrap of information into convincing context, but it’s not a piece of laboratory equipment.

There’s a positivity to the way it delivers music that basically guarantees entertainment, energy in the stuff that requires it and the most unhurried flow to the stuff that doesn’t. It can do light and shade, it can do calm and soothing, and it can do bug-eyed attack just as readily. The CD25’s talents are numerous, and each is as enjoyable and impressive as the other.

Should you buy it?