A talented and enjoyable CD player that will make you want to dust off your old discs and play them, over and over again.
Arcam CD5 : Read more
Arcam CD5 : Read more
Arcam CD5
- Thread starter What Hi-Fi?
- Start date
ScarboroughMark
Active member
Except the product can't play classical music, prog rock, opera, etc as it introduces an unwanted pause in between tracks of continuous music. Don't buy it if you listen to the above or any CD which has continuous music divided into separate tracks.
jetblack9090
Well-known member
As you can see at the bottom of the second page arcam has released a software update that adds gapless playback of CDs.
And I assume from here on out any new stock of the CD player will feature the software update so no one will have to worry about it.
I noticed this morning when I looked on their site that this update was available, I was looking forward to it because I have purchased the A5 integrated amp and wanted to get the matching CD player, but the lack of gapless put me off.
Anyway I'm glad to see that they follow through with their promise of the update.
ScarboroughMark
Active member
Good to see, although the features are still rather limited, including the apparent lack of a search (<< / >>) facility.
mjrussell
Active member
I bought a CD5 in May 2024. It wasn't installed with latest firmware update 6.4 so i installed it from the Arcam website. Easy. Gapless playback works fine now. I tested my Karajan/BPO recording of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring and tracks flow seamlessly. However, CD text is not available. This seems crazy for 2024. I emailed Arcam support - they replied quickly, confirmed it isn't available and they're working on it - it should be available in a future software update.
My impressions. I was upgrading from a Marantz 6006. The Arcam sounds better. More detailed and generally a brilliant sound. I'm keeping it and am very happy with all its audio aspects. But everything else is way worse than the Marantz. It's as if Arcam thought, let's design the most fantastic sounding CD player for 2024 and give it the worst feature set we can think of. The remote is useless - you can't locate tracks by number - i wanted to play track 26 on a classical CD and had to manually hit 'next track' until i got to 26. On the Marantz controller it has numeric input and this would have taken 2 seconds. The 'repeat all' feature i use often - there's no indication on the CD player that it's on or off. And you have to click a few buttons to access the menu of the controller. Again, on the Marantz easy - 1 button on the controller with an icon on the 6006 display. The CD5 display is hopeless - the main display strip is as if it's behind a layer of cotton wool and the other displays are so dimly lit it's hard to tell whether they're off or on. I tried the 3 digital filter settings and opted for 'slow' as my favourite. But again not so easy to access from the feeble remote. So i recommend the CD5 for the sound but nothing else.
My impressions. I was upgrading from a Marantz 6006. The Arcam sounds better. More detailed and generally a brilliant sound. I'm keeping it and am very happy with all its audio aspects. But everything else is way worse than the Marantz. It's as if Arcam thought, let's design the most fantastic sounding CD player for 2024 and give it the worst feature set we can think of. The remote is useless - you can't locate tracks by number - i wanted to play track 26 on a classical CD and had to manually hit 'next track' until i got to 26. On the Marantz controller it has numeric input and this would have taken 2 seconds. The 'repeat all' feature i use often - there's no indication on the CD player that it's on or off. And you have to click a few buttons to access the menu of the controller. Again, on the Marantz easy - 1 button on the controller with an icon on the 6006 display. The CD5 display is hopeless - the main display strip is as if it's behind a layer of cotton wool and the other displays are so dimly lit it's hard to tell whether they're off or on. I tried the 3 digital filter settings and opted for 'slow' as my favourite. But again not so easy to access from the feeble remote. So i recommend the CD5 for the sound but nothing else.
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