Archive: Arcam Alpha 7

7-up from a perennial UK favourite

By Michael Jones

April 2005 (originally appeared in November 1997)

Arcam Alpha 7 CD player, $1399. Alpha 7 amplifier, $1099. Alpha 7 tuner, $999.

Phone calls - boy, do I get phone calls (the hi-fi industry is a very talkative one). And of all these phone calls, many are from AudioEnz readers wanting advice on buying hi-fi.

I'm always happy to help readers think through their hi-fi purchases. It's very rare that I tell someone exactly what to buy - life just isn't that simple. Instead I'm try to ask intelligent (hopefully!) questions about what the caller is trying to achieve, based on their listening habits, room size and layout, musical tastes and budget. From the questions I ask and the answers given, most callers are left with a better idea of what to looks for and a few potential items to listen to.

In talking with these callers the name Arcam kept cropping up - either from myself or the caller. So I decided that it was time I reacquainted myself with what has long been one of my favourite hi-fi brands.

Around a year ago Arcam released an all-new Alpha range of electronics. Three CD players (one - the Alpha 9 - still to be released), three integrated amplifiers, two tuners and two power amps, all in Arcam's new curvaceous style.

For this system column I decided to look at the bottom of the range: the Alpha 7 CD player, tuner and amplifier.

CD player

The Alpha 7 CD player ($1399) comes with all of the normal features that would be expected at this price. The front panel strikes a nice balance between the minimalist "fewer buttons are better" school of thought and the "all singing and dancing" overkill that still infects some CD players. This means that you can easily drive the CD player if you choose to live without the remote control (or if you've lost it!).

The remote control adds in a numeric keypad for track selection, plus a volume control. This volume control doesn't work the output of the CD player (placing a volume pot in this position can adversely affect the sound quality). Instead, it drives the volume control on remote-controlled Arcam amplifiers, such as the Alpha 8 and Alpha 9 integrated amps. Sadly, the Alpha 7 amp (the one I had in this system) cannot be remote controlled.

Arcam include two ways of the Alpha 7 to be upgraded. The first is a coaxial digital output on the rear panel, allowing an external digital-to-analog convertor (DAC) to be added. The second is by an internal board swap, converting Alpha 7 into an Alpha 8 or 9 (when the Alpha 9 is eventually released). The cost for the upgrades is the same as the retail price between the players.

Amplifier

The front panel of the Alpha 7 amplifier ($1099) is dominated by a large rotary volume control at the centre left. Also on the front panel are bass and treble tone controls (along with a "defeat" switch to remove the tone controls from the audio circuit); a switch for powering a second set of speakers; and a headphone socket.

The rear panel incudes all the normal inputs and putputs expected, plus a couple of extras. A set of preamp-out sockets allow for upgrading via biamping your speakers with the addition of an Arcam power amplifier.

The speaker connections are a little different as well. The powers-that-be at the European Union have decreed that banana plugs (standard on most UK amplifiers and speakers) are dangerous, as the plugs could be inserted into European power sockets. Arcam have come up with an alternative socket, which are included on the Alpha 7 amp.

Tuner

Arcam produce two tuners which are exactly the same - except for remote control. The Alpha 8 adds remote operation plus a remote control which also works most Arcam CD players and remote controllable amplifiers. But as part of this system I have the Alpha 7 ($999).

The Alpha 7 tuner can store up to16 FM preset stations and 8 AM presets - useful for station hoppers in today's radio scene. The tuning itself is accomplished by up and down tuning buttons, with a green light showing on the Alpha's display to indicate the correct tuning.

Unlike some modern tuners, the Alpha 7 includes both FM and AM (it also includes long wave - useful in Europe but useless here in New Zild.) On the rear of the tuner are the standard FM and AM aerial connectors. Also on the back are two audio outputs. Arcam include a second set for use in multi-room systems.

The manual for the Alpha 7 tuner is particularly good, with plenty of excellent advice on both FM and AM aerials.

Sound

I had the Arcam Alpha 7 system at home for a few weeks, enabling a good examination of the products and sound by myself and various visitors.

Listening to the Alpha 7 system was undertaken primarily with the Epos ES14 loudspeakers. I did try the Alpha system with a pair of Thiel 1.5's that were inhouse, but that was an unsuccessful experiment (the Thiels like a rather more substantial amplifier than the Alpha 7).

The Alpha 7 CD player presents a big, bold and lively sound - this is no shrinking violet of a CD player! This CD player shows its strengths in musical communication - portraying the bounce, rhythm and drive of the music. You'll find that there are players in a similar price range that can sound a little smoother and refined, but without the life of the Alpha 7 CD player.

Probably the pick of the three components is the Alpha 7 integrated amplifier. This is a wonderful amplifier - far better than its price would suggest.

As an example, one day I plugged my Meridian 508 CD player into the Alpha 7 amp (that's a $5000 CD player going into a $1099 amplifier). The improvement in the sound of the system was startling - showing that the Alpha 7 amplifier can easily portray quality sources without the compromise you'd expect at this price level.

Drawbacks? Only that it clips easily when driven hard, so pair it with an efficient pair of speakers.

Many people overlook tuners, which is a pity as they can be a great source of music and information. And at its $999 price, I suspect that many people will overlook the Alpha 7 tuner for something cheaper - and much worse.

My in-home radio listening is mainly to the Concert Programme (FM) and National Radio (AM). So I demand that a tuner not only sound good on FM, but also have an excellent sounding AM stage.

The latter is hard to find. Almost all modern day tuners have a cheap and nasty AM stage, which can simply be unpleasant to listen to. No wonder AM has got a reputation of sounding awful!

The Alpha 7 tuner's AM stage is more than listenable. It is articulate and free of the "nasties" that plague the "cheap'n'nasty" tuners. Voices on National Radio display the inflexions that real voices have - and many cheap tuners bulldoze away. (Don't laugh at this emphasis on AM - more than a quarter of a million people listen to Brian Edwards' National Radio show on Saturday mornings.

The FM stage was also good. I found I could listen to the Concert Programme with great delight.

Concluding thoughts

After living with the Arcam 7 system for a few weeks, it's easy to see and hear why Arcam is so popular with hi-fi purchasers and hi-fi dealers. And I see that I'll still be talking Arcam to many callers in the future.

Sidebar: No more dead end street

What can you do with a piece of old hi-fi besides trying to get a pittance for it second hand? Given the very public upgradability of computers (I'm contemplating a new processor card for my Macintosh 7500 - the very machine on which this magazine is produced), it was inevitable that someone would produce upgradable hi-fi. And they did: Micromega introduced the concept of upgrading CD players by swapping the internals a couple of years back.

Now Arcam have gone one better. With the current Alpha CD players, you can upgrade from the Alpha 7 to the Alpha 8 to the Alpha 9 (assuming that this long-announced CD player ever appears!) Your hi-fi dealer can do the board swap instore, or have it sent back to the distributor to be done. Currently the cost of going from one CD player to another is the difference in their retail prices.

Arcam have offered CD upgrades in the past, but this time everything works out nicely. Now Arcam include the badge for the new player in the upgrade box, so your CD player truly looks like the next model up.

Arcam have also introduced the concept of upgradability in their Alpha amplifiers. Upgrading an amplifier can be more difficult than with a CD player. Often a major difference between the various amplifiers in a range is the size of the power supply - transformer and smoothing capacitors. In theory, these could be changed along with a board swap, but in practice it's normally not financially viable.

Instead Arcam offer an upgrade through bi-amping. For the past several years, most speakers aimed at the hi-fi market have included a split crossover, which can be used for bi-wiring (running two sets of speaker cables from the amplifier to both the bass and treble sections of the speaker crossover). With many hi-fi systems, biwiring can improve the sound quality.

Bi-amping (or more correctly, passive bi-amping) takes bi-wiring to the next stage. Instead of just running separate cables to each section of the crossover, why not used separate amplifiers to power each section. Each of the Arcam integrated amplifiers has "pre-out" sockets to achieve just this.

With the Alpha 7 amplifier, you can buy an Alpha 8 power amplifier (plus a cable) and hook the 8 up to the pre-out sockets on the back of the Alpha 7 amp. Run one set of speaker cables from the Alpha 8 power amp to the woofer terminals, another from the Alpha 7 to the tweeter terminals, and there you have it - a passively biamped hi-fi system.

I've never tried passive bi-amping, but Arcam have been pushing the concept among the UK hi-fi press over the past year. I've read a fair bit of copy on bi-amping using Arcam amplifiers in the UK press, all of it positive.

And in case you were wondering, active bi-amping requires the use of an external crossover - a line level device that splits the music signal between the woof and the tweet before sending the split signal along to the required power amps. But that's whole new story.