Arcam's A19 has been on the market for a while now, but that hasn't stopped us admiring it's many talents. Compared to its predecessor the A18, the A19 sounds more agile, detailed & textured. This however doesn't mean it's lost any of that "Arcam richness" or impressive "large scale" character.

The A19 is equipped with 8 analogue inputs (x1 MM phono stage, x1 3.5mm jack & x6 phono pairs) to connect all of your analogue sources, x1 record output, x1 pre out (to add extra power amps), a headphone amp (Arcam quote "A stand-alone headphone stage of similar quality would cost hundreds!") and lastly a independent 6V Auxiliary power supply to provide cleaner power to select Arcam rSeries products (rLink & rBlink) compared with the supplied wall wart power supplies included with the rSeries products.

The A19 uses a 50watt Class A/B amplifier powered by a high performance custom toroidal transformer capable of driving every speaker we have connected to it so far. The most interesting part of the A19 for me lies in the resistive ladder volume control, this is the same circuit found in Arcam’s top-of-the-range FMJ AV888 processor! Which I feel is one of the main reasons for such a fantastic sounding integrated amplifier.