Arcam FMJ | MS250 | Music Server

Like many music lovers, we here at Arcam love the idea of being able to access any part of a music collection in seconds from all round the home. The growing interest in hard drive storage devices has been fuelled by an exploding interest in downloading music lead by the phenomenal success of the Apple iPod™.

The FMJ MS250 offers exceptional audio performance and ease of use and that is backed up by Arcam’s history of building some of the best CD players ever made over the last 20 years. It is the first truly audiophile quality server on the market and draws from Arcam’s 30-year history of making world-class audio products. It also performs brilliantly as a stand-alone CD player, thus being the perfect source for a highperformance stereo system.

The Music Server’s massive 400-gigabyte hard drive can hold around 700 albums uncompressed and over 4,800 albums or 80,000 tunes if audio compression is used.

You can ‘rip’ (copy to disc) a whole album to the music server’s hard drive in minutes. You can store your music by artist, album, genre, and create favourite playlists. Four different pieces of music may be played simultaneously in each individual zone, but perhaps even more usefully it can hold your entire music collection ready to play at a moment’s notice. This easy access to all your favourite music avoids the hassle of finding yet another empty CD case and realising that the missing disc is still in the car’s auto-changer or borrowed by a family member.

The process of recording an album is extremely simple. The MS250 can be set to copy every disc you play automatically while you enjoy the music. You can then edit them later and if necessary organise your music by artist, genre, etc. when you review what you played recently. Storing typically takes nine or ten minutes for an average album. You can burn your favourite tracks onto a CDR disc that you can play in the car or on another system and even record compilations from your favourite playlists.

Navigating your entire collection is a simple affair from the front panel without the need to turn on an external display. When a video monitor is connected, the onscreen- menu makes adding text or reviewing favourite playlists more convenient from the remote control. You can hook up a keyboard to the MS250, which makes editing your choices even quicker.

The MS250 provides for either simple IR remote control of the four zones or, for more complex installations, the zones can be controlled via computer controlled via RS232 or network connection. In addition to music stored on the MS250’s hard drive, the unit can play music from other sources connected to the same computer network. This means that tracks stored on PCs or Macs around the house can be played as if they were on the MS250 itself, without copying them from one unit to another. In addition, a large number of internet radio stations can be received as well as the latest album information via the internet.

To achieve the level of sound quality to meet our audiophile standards has meant designing a sophisticated audio board that would use state-of-the-art techniques as well as using the very best audiophile quality components throughout. Particular attention has been paid to the power supply for the digital and analogue circuits that feed the high precision digital-toanalogue converters using similar design principles to those seen in our high-end CD players. Arcam has designed a sophisticated digital-to-analogue converter system with four separate zone outputs and an analogue-to-digital converter for two analogue inputs.

The MS250 allows you to have your own collection combined with other music on your network in a product delivering a level of sound quality that truly brings your music to life.