Arcam Black Box DAC

Not only a truly classic piece of British hi-fi, but also a word first. Launched in February 1989, the Arcam Black Box DAC was world's first dedicated digital to analogue converter. Prior to this all compact disc players had been one box affairs and it was very soon after the launch of the Arcam Black Box DAC that other manufacturers joined the bandwagon and started producing two box cd players.

In all honesty Arcam's decision to launch the Arcam Black Box DAC was probably one of the best things to happen to CD, as it gave manufacturers the opportunity to delve deeper into the technology and gave consumers much improved technology and sound quality through transport to DAC clock synching that reduced jitter and improved timing and coherence of the outputted sound.

Arcam's Black Box DAC originally sold for £550 and was based around a Philips 16 bit TDA1541 stereo DAC with four times oversampling and incorporated one of the worlds first SPDIF digital outputs which at the time was cutting edge. If anyone has ever wondered, the SPDIF is actually an aconym for Sony Philips Digital InterFace . Arcam sold about 10,000 Black Box's in a very short space of time which was always going to be the case because the Black Box sounded so much better than anything else in the market place and forced other manufacturers to catch up which they did, and it wasn't long before the sound quality of single boxes were on a par with the Arcam Black Box.

If anyone is interested, Arcam Black Box's occasionally come up fro auction on Ebay and although not a long piece of equipment in terms of product life it really did advance CD technology and the other manufacturers a wake up call.

This entry was posted on Monday December 19th, 2005 at 7:45 PM and is filed under CD Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.

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