So I've been sitting down with the fmj A29 and giving it a good listen before I say goodbye to it. What I said in my initial impressions above and my general feelings about it haven't really changed.
Perhaps one thing that has become more emphasized in my mind about it is that it is a refined sounding amplifier, it's never going to sound harsh. But in its effort to sound so refined it kind of fails because it ends up just sounding safe most of the time. It does have detail, in fact it probably reveals more detail than the Denon but the impression it gives is more "listen to the pretty detail in this part of the song" rather than giving you the coherent sense of the song as a whole and letting you see how the detail goes into constructing that song, if that makes sense. Anyway, the Denon kind of does the opposite: this amp is not at the level to give you layers and layers of detail but boy are you going to get the general picture of the music and you're going to have fun when you're doing it!
The sense of performance in the music sort of gets lost with the Arcam. With Richard Hawley's magnificent Open Up Your Door the music builds to a crescendo as it should but doesn't take you up a mountain to see the sunlit uplands at the climax of the song the way the Denon does. Bass is deeper and richer on A29 and it should be with 80 wpc into 8 ohms and 140 into 4. Impact though is less impressive, at least with my Triangle speakers. The guy who sold it to me was running MA Gold 100 and they sounded like a better match than my Triangles. Quite a different sound to my set up and very happy playing the jazz that he was demoing the amp for me. And lastly, it doesn't do the magic thing with the voices the way my Denon/Triangle combination does: Lana Del Rey, Dionne Warwick, Astrud Gilberto all the stuff of goosebumps!
It was weird selling it on the Bay. I got loads of watchers, emphasized that it was in pristine condition with all the packaging and told several people that it had one minor fault in 2018 but had behaved faultlessly since then. I thought it might fetch £450 even £500 but with 10 minutes to go it was on £215. One minute 215, 20 seconds still 215, 10 secs same, 1 sec 215... then when the winning bid came up it was £360! Phew... £20 more than I paid for it.