the record spot:John Arcam Dawson:
The full story behind the Delta 100 cassette deck is a long one - perhaps for another time - the short version is that this first design didn't really make money despite its £850 price tag. It was one of the first units in the market with Dolby S - a very powerful analogue noise reduction system - and with good tape and not too demanding music it was difficult to tell a CD and the taped copy apart. Unfortunately this time also saw the launch of the ill fated DCC (digital compact cassette) by Phillips and Matsushita and its rival MD (Mini Disc) by Sony, and our unit was caught in the crossfire as it were. In particular Sony used its manufacture of the Dolby S chipsets (they were the sole supplier at the time) to drive down cassette deck costs to try to kill DCC - they succeeded by the way - and we could never get economy of scale we needed with a follow up Alpha class machine because the complete decks were sold on the market at well below the cost of us buying mass volume of kits of parts. So it goes. I still have one by the way
And thanks for the praise on the Alpha 5/6 series - a range which really put us on the map and which were made (in the UK) in very large numbers - this was before Chinese based manufacture led to a catastrophic fall in prices (from our point of view!) as with DVD players and so on.
John Dawson
Thanks for the detailed reply John. It does raise a question though thinking about the DCC and MD saga of the day and more recently the hi-res audio disappointments of DVD-A & SACD orthe HD Blu-Ray face-off.
As a manufacturer, what is your (or Arcam's) take on developing a - for instance - SACD compatible player for market? What would influence the decision making within an organisation that would lead you to go with SACD over DVD-A or HDCD compatibility?
I am aware however, that the DV137 (I think it is?) is a universal player and was one of the few in the £800-£1000 bracket to be so, along with Denon's 3930 and NAD's T585. What was the driver behind this development and would you emulate the Marantz step of including SACD on an audio only player (their SA7001 players) to cater for that market?
As a consumer, I was delighted to see these three players turning up (along with Oppo's 980 unit at the budget end) - it drove me to distraction that no manufacturer catered for this!
These format wars seem to occur quite regularly and they are usually
disasters for all parties. As a relatively small company which
nevertheless likes to design its own products from the ground up this
affects Arcam particularly badly, as we are expected by the marketplace
to support multiple rival formats and that inevitably hugely
complicates the product design.
A big driver for us is always
the availability of a suitable SOC (system on a chip) IC around which
to base the design. These are inevitably very software heavy and most
IC vendors will simply not support companies of Arcam's size. In the
case of the formats you mention above we have built up a long term
relationship with Zoran, one of the biggest DVD chip vendors - we are,
if you like, Zoran's boutique customer. When Zoran eventually produced
a family of parts that supported SACD then we too (after
lots of
development work) were able to include it in our offerings - if they
had not done this it would have been really difficult to do anything in
this space with another chip vendor (e.g. Mediatek) because of the
constraints mentioned above.
Finally we do now also have a
CD/SACD player - the CD37 - based of course on the Zoran platform which
earlier spawned the DV135/137/139 family of universal DVD/CD/DVD-A/SACD
players and the Solo Movie designs. This is especially popular in Asia
where SACD is still a semi-alive format.
I hope this necessarily abbreviated reply helps cast a little light on a very complex situation.
John
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