Price Paid:  $4798.00 from Sothebii's

Summary:
Certainly your door jambs must be loose. I hit mine with the Arcam's extruded leather cone and the sound was incredible. I have repeated the experience and it just keeps on rounding up (the sound, I mean). You too should try it. My brother-in-law has done some tests in the bath tub, but the fuse kept blowing up all the time. Anyway, during the brief smashing periods and before the buzzing, the sound was quite superb!!

Strengths:
The box is quite sturdy and withstands repeated abuse.

Weaknesses:
The power cord is meither elastic nor waterproof and shocks can be quite a nuissance.

Similar Products Used:
Cupboard, hammer, head.

Price Paid:  $300.00 from harry's bar

Summary:
the arcam has a forward sound that can be a bit bright in the wrong system.but the only reason i swapped it for the pink triangle, is that i love making dac's sound ten times better night and day difference' so i went to work on it read on if you want to find out more i changed all the five ics. opamps. for very fast ones, of a very high sandard

Strengths:
and i increased the the voltage and the vaue of the smoothing caps when i finished the dac,sounds is amazing warm airy each instrument is now seprate from the preformer.i reckon it will now compete with dac's twice the price.

Weaknesses:
none all strenth's if you own a arcam black box dac, you owe it to your self do do these mods i can do them for you no probs bargin up grade

Similar Products Used:
pink triangle ordinal 20 bit meridian 263 dac wich i done for my freind he is over the moon

Price Paid:  $7500.00 from Audiophiles

Summary:
Sad to read the bad experiences of other. The black box that I have must have been made by a different group (Arcam). One word - Brilliant. It took about 3 days to "run in". Thereafter the system sounded quite extraordinary. The soundstage is vivid and clear. Worth tripple its price.

Strengths:
The whole DAC is its strength

Weaknesses:
Not many will be able to purchase the prouct in the future - Sheer pleasure is denied those that do not have one.

Similar Products Used:
Used with Thetha,

Price Paid:  $350.00 from second hand purchase

Summary:
having bought a new Arcam CD 72 player was not over enthusiastic about the sound which I found a little too revealing so managed to get a Black Box 55 fairly cheaply. prior to the 500 used a black box 50 which was ok. the 500 has a more mature soound if you know what I mean. sorry to hear from others who have made negative comments about the build quality. have had little trouble with their products but when I have Arcam have been very helpful. to sum up the black box 500 would improve the performance of a cheap player of one which was bright sounding.

Strengths:
solid sound, choice of digital conversion rates

Weaknesses:
none that I can think of.

Similar Products Used:
Arcam CD72

Price Paid:  $735.00

Summary:
While I can understand that those with lesser systems might experience the problems described by Kevin Nurdsely, I was fortunate in that the super-impeller cooling system I fitted only last week to my home-built quad-anode indpendent amplification unit (in order to smooth out a minor but niggling tendency to sub-aural whooping in the contralto registers) sucked in the smoke with commendable efficiency, whereupon all traces were lost in the four-level carbon/ion filtration system. As for listening experience, I can only suggest that Aldgit's 20 foot Watson's would, like any so-called "speaker", have coloured his or anybody else's. All experienced listeners would be more than eager to point out that such clumsy mechanisms could do nothing else and I, for one, would never listen other than with the highest quality headphones. So, firmly ensconced in my Hiaung-Swan KS3200 "Super-Sullound" hydro-damped reality enhancers (with the damping system naturally fed from a firmly anchored, high capacity, flexible reservoir rather than the cheaper but less effective direct connection to the rising main), it was with trepidation only on behalf of Arcam that I settled back and hit the GO button on my state of the art, solid-state MP3 player. I was not disappointed. I am happy to report that the Arcam rendered all the recordings I tried with effortless precision and the knife-like delivery of every individual compression artefact was such that I was able to identify and correct a previously undetected framing error in the encoding of one of my less-used John Shuttleworth cuts. Overall a big step forward in the never-ending story of the evolution of my system from the now dim early beginnings towards it's undoubtedly glorious future as the perfect listening environment. I would recommend this unit without hesitation to anyone whose system, like mine, is hovering on the edge of taking that bold step from the fourth age of development to the first tentative forays in the fifth.