Arcam

Arcam's story begins in the early 1970s in Cambridge, England, where university students John Dawson and Chris Evans bonded over a shared love of music and electronics through the university's Tape Recording Society. That friendship turned into a business in 1976, when the pair founded A&R Cambridge Ltd — Amplification & Recording — and built the A60 integrated amplifier by hand in small batches for friends and fellow enthusiasts.

The A60 went on to become one of British hi-fi's true classics, establishing Arcam's reputation for accessible, musically focused engineering rather than showy luxury for its own sake — a thread that has run through the brand ever since. Over the decades that followed, Arcam pushed into new territory again and again: the Black Box, one of the first domestic add-on DACs; the pioneering Alpha and Delta separates; the FMJ ("Full Metal Jacket") series; and, more recently, the Radia range and a wide portfolio of AV processors and streaming components.

Now part of Harman International, Arcam still designs and engineers everything in-house in Cambridgeshire, staying true to the same principle that built the A60: hi-fi that's simple to use, beautifully made, and built first and foremost to sound great.