Arcam DV27A DVD Player - The Perfect Vision
From the March/April 2004 issue:
The Arcam's video quality is at the pinnacle of what's available at any price. Some mass-market player with those new, high-horsepower video DACs may show a smidgeon more fine detail. But the Arcam has something else going for it: Its images are more solid, more pure, and more three-dimensional—you sink right into them. Colors have a richness and palpability that the mass-market players can't match, and with its incredible resolving power, the Arcam delivers more shadow detail and gradation at the low end of the grayscale, and more overall dynamic range, to borrow an audio term. On the audio front, the DV27A is a truly reference-quality CD player, competitive with dedicated CD players that cost much, much more. ..the DV27A is, in fact, the finest DVD-A player I've yet heard, blessed with the same lively, dynamic, focused, and musically engaging sound I love about the DV27A's CD performance. The Arcam FMJ DV27A clearly sets the performance benchmark for a single-box that plays CDs, DVD-V, and DVD-A.
Arcam AV8 Surround Processor & DV27A DVD Player - Widescreen Review
Here's what Peter Moncrief had to say about the
AV8 in the January 2004 issue of IAR:
What makes the video of the Arcam DV27A DVD player so superb? First, it excels at achieving the highly coveted look of real film. Secondly, the DV27A excels at reproducing what we call the midrange of video. It reveals and reproduces unbelievably subtle nuances of luminance, color hue, and color saturation gradations. And it handily surpasses other DVD players in reproducing these subtle gradations where they matter most, toward the middle of the ranges of these video parameters. Real human flesh tones and the real appearances of most objects have incredibly subtle variations, over every square micron of their surface, in luminance, and in the color values of hue and saturation.
...we directly compared the sound of the Arcam AV8 surround processor, feeding the signal through its longest and most complex internal path (one even involving extra A/D and D/A conversion steps), to the sound of competing high end processors 1 and 2, feeding the signal merely through their simplest and shortest path (an analog volume control and line section buffer stage). The AV8 still won!
The AV8 still revealed more information from the recording, and portrayed better spatial imaging, even though it was handicapped with both hands tied behind its back. Amazing! International Audio/Video Review, December 2003
This review appeared in both Widescreen Review and in the web-based International Audio Video Review. The Widescreen review was an edited version of Moncrief's original review. The downloadable PDF contains the longer, unedited review as it originally appeared on the IAR website.
Arcam DV27A DVD-A Player - AVGuide
From the December 2003 issue:
If you’ve followed our sister print magazines The Perfect Vision and The Absolute Sound over the past year or so, you know our reviewers have raved over Arcam’s FMJ DV27 DVD player (in 2002 it received both TPV’s DVD Player of the Year Award and a Golden Ear award from TAS—a rare convergence, indeed). Why so much praise, and for a comparatively expensive player? The answer is that the DV27 offered video and audio performance that were both extraordinary, making it one of very few products that offer true reference grade playback for films and music... Now, Arcam has replaced the DV27 with an updated model called the DV27A, which offers everything we loved in the original plus DVD-Audio capabilities...
While some videophiles argue that all good progressive-scan players produce on-screen images that look pretty much the same, my unequivocal response after spending time with the DV27A would be, “Actually, they don’t.” In comparison to many good progressive-scan players, the DV27A showed three benefits that any layman could appreciate. First, on film-based material, the DV27A offered motion that was plainly smoother, more continuous, and more film-like than that seen from most other players; I experienced this, oddly enough, not only as a pleasing visual phenomenon, but also as the removal of viewing fatigue (as though, perhaps on a subliminal level, I felt more relaxed because my eye/brain interface wasn’t having to work as hard to make sense of the images on the screen). Second, I observed a heightened level of color purity—somewhat analogous to the differences one would see in comparing images from a noise-free digital camera to those from a camera that had some noise. The net result was that the DV27A offered a cleaner, clearer window into the world of the film...
While the player’s $2999 list price may at first seem daunting, consider this: you could easily spend a similar sum on a competing audio-only CD player whose sound (if you were fortunate) might be comparable to the Arcam’s, but that hypothetical player probably wouldn’t provide superb DVD-A capabilities and wouldn’t be a top class progressive-scan DVD player. Viewed from this perspective, the excellent and versatile FMJ DV27A suddenly seems a justifiable investment—one that might even save you money in the long run by encouraging you to get off the “player du jour” merry-go-round and to relax and enjoy the best in films and music, beautifully reproduced in your home.