The AV world is moving fast and sometimes it’s hard for companies to keep up; different audio and video formats make the player you bought last year look dated today. And if you’re taking your home cinema seriously you also need a mighty amplifier the size of a microwave oven to power all those speakers.

Or do you…?

British hi-fi company Arcam have decided that they are ready to enter the relatively niche market of DVD players that have integrated amplifiers on board. Such an idea would have been heresy to any serious audio or videophile only a few years ago but I have a feeling that those old perceptions are about to be challenged.

So, what does this box of tricks do? At a simple level it’s a CD player, DVD player, a digital surround decoder, a preamp and a 5 channel power amplifier, all in a box the size of a conventional DVD player. It also contains a video scaler that will upscale a standard DVD picture to 720p or 1080i (the idea being to make DVDs look better on high resolution displays)

Not satisfied with that, they also put in circuits to handle the high resolution / multi channel audio formats of SACD and DVD-Audio.

Then they thought “why stop there” and added DivX movie playback and a DAB/FM tuner.

Then, just for good measure they made it iPod ready (with a separate dock).

Finally, and just because they could, they also made it multi-room capable so it can power a separate set of speakers in another part of the house.

So basically you plug in a TV and speakers and you’re ready to roll.

Oh yes, and lastly (as the headline says) it’s got an alarm clock function, just in case you have the sort of disposable income that could place this into a bedroom!

More information from www.arcam.co.uk