This is a review written by Terry Ellis June 2025.

For my video review please see my YouTube channel link here

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Arcam, an old hat, but with new shoes

Arcam the British HiFi manufacturer have been around for decades but it’s great the their A25 is very much a modern integrated amplifier. To me that means a very nicely styled modern aesthetic with a nice screen  but it also mean fully featured. The A25 features a DAC, a phono stage and headphone amplifier for a £1499 RRP. It has had me thinking about HiFi system building and finding personal HiFi happiness because when I looked at what other amplifiers you can buy around this price the many different options is overwhelming. There are so many to choose between I think it would be very confusing to someone who is new and still confusing to someone more seasoned. I think in that situation its very easy for someone to base their buying decision purely on scores in the reviews, how many stars they might get, but is that a sensible way to do it?

I know most of you will be “old enough” to relate to this, years ago I bought a HiFi system of all 5 star reviewed products, but when I set it up I didn’t like the sound of it. This is not a criticism of other reviews, its more about how important it is to build a system that speaks to you, it doesn’t have to be 5 stars to anyone else, just 5 stars to you. I am going to make sense of this because its so very relevant to an amplifier like the Arcam A25.

Clear progress

If there is an audio brand I have a soft spot for it would be Arcam, probably because I have spent so many hours calibrating their AV products but also because I like their class g amplifiers. There is something about how they sound that triggers some emotion in me, maybe its familiarity, maybe its something else but it happens to me.

The last Arcam I had here was the SA30 integrated amplifier that I bought with my own money back in September 2022. I have got to be honest I didn’t love the SA30. I did like the amplifier in it and it was great that it featured Dirac Live, that was a huge factor for me but I didn’t love how the amplifier looked, the way it was built, the screen, the streaming experience or its built in DAC so as a whole package it didn’t really work for me.

Roll on some time and the new Arcam Radia series I am really glad to say has fixed a lot of my gripes with the SA30, most notably being the styling. The new look is a huge improvement and it’s not only more modern it’s much nicer. I can see the colour yellow splitting opinion but its certainly bold. What I like is from certain angles you don’t see as much yellow as from others so its just an accent at times and I think its very nice. The build quality seems better too, there is a more solid feeling about A25 without the same clunkiness the SA30 had when you pressed its front panel buttons. The A25 is very slim line, so easy to accommodate in or on some furniture rather than needing a dedicated HiFi rack. It is also pretty cool how the screen is hidden behind the front panel so its not obvious there is a screen unless its on, this works even better for me because the screen is very similar to that on the SA30 which wasn’t its best attribute. The screen being hidden to some degree gives it a fresher look.

The two control knobs one for volume, one for input selection I like how the yellow glow or halo makes them visually pop and you can control the halo brightness if you would prefer all stealthy black. In use, the resistance of both is a little loose, especially the volume but it’s ok. I think most people will control everything from the remote anyway and gone is another of my gripes with Arcam of old, the massive multi product generic remote control. Now we have a more sleek and simple remote that does the job very well, although, I didn’t find it obvious what all the buttons did from their symbols. I had to play with it get to familiar with it.

Round the back it’s a very simple affair with a nice layout of 3 analogue inputs and the moving magnet phono stage input. I do like how the analogue is kept well away from the power. In the middle are several digital inputs for using the built in DAC and I was very surprised to see a USB C input and not USB type b that is far more common for HiFi products. This is such a strange one as I know USB C is generic now, however not for HiFi yet, so yes I was very surprised to see it. Does it matter probably not, what will matter more to some will be the omission of HDMI ARC. I know that will a deal breaker for some but not everyone.

Popping the hood

I did take the lid off to look inside and the first thing I spotted was the pretty big toroidal transformer surrounded by what looks like some kind of shield and that was impressive to see. I am no engineer but there is definitely some interesting things about this amplifiers design, especially with what looks like two different sized transistors and if that is not what they are I apologise but that is what they look like to me. Overall this feels like a more simplistic design compared to some others I have looked inside but that might just be because there is only one heat sink and not the two I am more used to seeing. In hindsight I should have got images of the DAC chip which is an ESS Sabre 9280A Pro. That is not the very latest and greatest chip but we know that is not always that important with a product like this, I find its more important how the whole system has been balanced to sound and that is very well judged here.

The A25 is a class g based integrated amplifier which is Arcam’s hybrid way of combining class a sound quality with class a/b efficiency and this sounds great, on paper excuse the pun. It can deliver 100 watts of power per channel into 8 ohms and 165 watts into 4 ohms which is a very healthy amount of power from such a compact footprint. To get all of this technology and built quality for  under £1500 is impressive and makes the A25 seem potentially a great value HiFi buy. That is only true if you like its sound quality and with so many other amplifiers in price competition its not that simple either.  I have two of them here, both very good options. I think the Arcam’s big challenge, it has to do enough to justify you spend this much on it over a slightly cheaper competitor, but it also has to do enough so you don’t feel need the spend a bit extra for a slightly more expensive competitor. Think how tough that is so that is what I been testing

Sounds like

The A25 has a very obvious sound character that is easy for me to describe, it sounds warm, quite bold, quite rich and a little thick and that can make a lot of music sound very pleasing with the right speakers. That last bit is very important. It sounds like this without the treble sounding too dark which is an important distinction between it and some other warmer sounding amplifiers, however there are some less good bits about it too. It sounds a little thick and bloomed in the bass and its not the fastest or the clearest or most focused for a sound stage or the most lively energetic sounding amplifier either when you compare it, but it is still good in those areas. This is all true whether you are using the built in DAC or an external one so there is a lot that is very good here but I think it will be speakers and preference dependent.

Arcam being part of Harman means they have a close relationship with JBL and Revel speakers and I know Arcam used JBL speakers for testing the A25 because they told me so recently so maybe that is a great pairing recommendation straight off the bat. I don’t have any JBL here so I used two totally different speakers the Mission 770 and the Revival Audio SPRINT 4, both excellent speakers but very different. For comparisons I tested against two different solid state integrated amplifiers both that cost about £500 more the Cambridge Audio EXA100 and the Audiolab 9000a and they are both class a/b amplifiers if that matters to you.

My first comparison was using the Mission 770 and it was no surprise to me that I preferred both the Audiolab and Cambridge amplifiers. You would expect the Audiolab to be great with the Mission as they are from the same camp to some degree but the Cambridge I preferred because it has a more clean cut, lively and energetic what I call a “ballsy” sound and I think that works better with the slightly thicker, warmer, darker sounding Mission. Livening them up makes them sound more fun and more dynamic and I prefer to listen to music like that.

I still did like the Arcam with the Mission, just not as much, so yes I could have lived with that pairing but I think I would have spent the extra £500 for either the Cambridge or the Audiolab. Doing this test didn’t really feel fair to the Arcam based on the price delta between it and the £3500 Mission and I also felt this pairing was not optimum for giving the A25 the best opportunity to shine.

A better pairing

Spending time with the Revival Audio SPRINT 4 speakers and their obvious character, or lack of one maybe,  they are more lively and more neutral sounding speakers compared to the Mission, they seemed ideal for the A25. I did some extensive listening to this pairing over a few days and I am really glad I did because the Arcam’s charm started to rub off on me. Its not a perfect integrated but it does have some stand out strengths, one being it has quite a lush sound.  This made some of my music favourites like the Lady Blackbird Black Acid Soul album or Three Little Words album by Dominique Fils-Aime sound really nice. With the A25 its bold and rich and warm sound helped to make the big female vocals sound richer and sweeter and they sounded bigger in my room and I was really digging that. A new album discovery Steve Morrison Live at the basement that is a bit of an audiophile gem of an album, it has lot of recorded live ambience and fantastically well recorded instruments and it sounded fantastic with the A25 for having a tangible big sonic presence in my room.

This is because of the balance between the speakers and the A25. The clean, clear, focused excellent sound staging SPRINT 4 now with a full, warm and thick sound from the Arcam balanced really nicely overall and made for a very engaging listen across a big selection of music. I was appreciating some extra subtle details within the harmonics of the warmer sound, so the warmth does comes across as a “bloom” to the music but there are harmonics in it or that reminds me just a little bit  of valve amplifiers desirable qualities, just a little bit and I don’t mind that at all.

The DAC question

What surprised me more, this was all still true when I changed from using an expensive external DAC in the HiFi Rose RD160 to the built in ESS DAC. The built in DAC sounded much better than I expected and full kudos to the Arcam engineers because how the internal DAC balances with the amplifier is great. This was an achilles heel for me with the SA30, its not now with the A25. The DAC really plays to the A25’s big strength its bold and warm sound. There are three different DAC filter modes to choose between but I preferred the stock setting from the three. Do factor in for all of this testing I was using a very high quality digital source the HiFi Rose RS130 and that does make a difference to the overall sound quality of a system.

By the end of several days listening to the A25 it had won me over and I was really liking it with the SPRINT 4 and this is a pairing I could recommend as being worth having a listen to however I had to do some more comparison listening of course and I intended to compare to both the Audiolab 9000a and Cambridge EXA100 again using their built in DAC’s

I started with the Cambridge and this was only comparison I needed to do because nearly everything I preferred about the Cambridge with the Missions I still preferred with the SPRINT 4, with one big exception and one small one. The Cambridge sounded clearer and more focused where individual instruments cut through with better clarity. The bass was tighter and everything in the music sounded better organised so I would say the ECXA100 has a “technically better” sound from what seems to be the better amplifier. However the warm, lush Arcam sound that I had got used to was gone, music sounded a little more dry despite being clearer and more organised. Even though the Cambridge is the better amplifier here I could see some people preferring the warmer sound of the Arcam, sacrificing some clarity for the warmth, while keeping £500 in their pocket. That is where each individual must choose their own path to HiFi happiness. I can tell you which amplifier I think is better and why but you might not prefer it because music is an emotional personal listening experience that you cannot simplify into numbers or scores or go from simple data alone.

Final thoughts

In summary then, I like the Arcam A25 and appreciate how this is a clear step forward from the SA30 I owned a few years ago, in many ways. I can see it being a great choice for some people who are looking for a warmer sounding integrated amplifier, especially if you’re a medium volume listener this could be a good option for you. You can have a warmer sound with out needing a valve amplifier which are often much more expensive or a Musical Fidelity A1 could be ab alternative, but both generate a lot extra heat, with less power and therefore less convenience or flexibility.

For the full specification of the Arcam A25 see their website linked here