After some four years in development, Arcam has added the MS250 to its ‘FMJ’ range of hi-fi separates.

By no means the cheapest act available, it nevertheless promises audiophile sound quality based on Arcam’s CD player expertise and offers a handy capacity of 400GB – equivalent to well over 500 hours of uncompressed audio.

Stunning amount of storage

Lossless compression would have made that over 1,000 hours, but 500 should last most people a few years. In many respects, the specification is familiar, with multiple independent audio outputs fed from a hard drive, internal CD reader/writer, internet radio or line inputs, plus Ethernet, USB and video connections and a few other control sockets besides.

Arcam has upped the ante by offering four outputs (most servers seem to have three), but of these only one has a digital alternative to the analogue phono sockets. Is that a problem?

Possibly not: for one thing, if the sound quality via analogue outputs lives up to Arcam’s claims an external DAC is unlikely to do much to enhance it, while the really dedicated owner could still add something very fancy (think Chord, dCS etc.) in the principal listening zone to gild the lily.

Then again, digital interconnects have advantages on long runs and can also be connected via a wireless interface of some sort.

Inside Arcam's music server

Inside, we found not just similar, but identical control and power supply sections and a closely related CD transport, too. The audio board is completely different, though, so in a sense this is no more surprising than finding that two CD players share a transport and a handful of control chips.

And since we thought the Systemline was pretty well equipped on the control interface front, we’re bound to say the same of this machine, with all the connections we can easily imagine needing for typical application. Actually it has rather more inputs for remote control, giving extra flexibility in the implementation of a multi-room installation.

The audio board, all Arcam’s own work (the rest is clearly all bought in), carries high specification DACs chips of recent vintage from Cirrus/Crystal, followed by good-quality op-amps, resulting in a signal path not entirely unlike that of good current CD players.

Slow to store

The power supply is a switch-mode package – traditionally a no-no in high-quality audio, but we’re not alone in accepting that many recent hi-fi components using such a supply have demonstrated a perfectly acceptable, not to say impressive, performance.

The Meridian 808 Signature CD player, for instance. If switchmode is good enough for that epitome of digital excellence, we’re certainly not going to discount it in applications like this.

We’re still hunting for a server that can ‘store’ (they all seem to use that term – i.e. rip a CD to hard disk) really quickly. This one has two settings – Fast and Quiet, but while Fast seems to run at only about eight times normal speed (and is anything but quiet), Quiet runs at a rather tedious four times speed and is far from silent.

Still, it’s always entertaining to see track details etc. and even cover artwork pop up automatically, thanks to a seamless connection to an online database.

Music cataloguing made fun

If your collection features a lot of really obscure CDs, you may have to enter some details yourself, but it’s not too tiresome and you can add a PC keyboard to speed things up.

A TV or VGA display is, as usual with servers, more a requirement than a luxury for setting up, but simple selection and playing functions are perfectly possible using only the front panel display.